


Gretel and the Dark Forest

by tentaclemonster



Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [57]
Category: Hänsel und Gretel | Hansel and Gretel (Fairy Tale)
Genre: 100 Fandoms Challenge, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Cannibalism, Child Abuse, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Gen, Horror, Mindfuck, Religious Content, Self-Harm, Starvation, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 21:27:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22832530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentaclemonster/pseuds/tentaclemonster
Summary: “The Dark Forest is not a normal place. It is an evil, godless stretch of land which has a heart as real as that of any man.”
Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [57]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1257083
Kudos: 24
Collections: The 100 Multifandom Challenge





	Gretel and the Dark Forest

**Author's Note:**

> 057/100 for the 100 Fandoms Challenge. Written for prompt #71 – ground.

The Dark Forest was a misnomer for the great expanse of woodland that stretched from the northern top of the village Verlassen and only ended many miles away at the southern end of the village Nachbarin was no darker than any other place and the word forest was much too small to truly encompass the size of this place in particular. 

The Dark Forest was, in most sections, quite sunny. 

There were entire clearings within the forest which looked as though they had been methodically paved over by man in preparation for the building of some town or home or a field to plow and plant in until such plans were forgotten and the grass took over instead, but which were entirely naturally formed, and within these clearings the sun shined more brightly than you would see anywhere else. 

Even in the deeper parts of the forest where the pines or oaks more closely stood together as though they were ill-dressed children trying to huddle for warmth in the winter, the sun still shined through. A ray shining down here, glittering through the trees with pollen dancing in its light. An entire circle of light there, where one could stand and feel the heat of the sun atop their head, soaking into the marrow of their every strand of hair. 

There was no part of the Dark Forest which was truly dark in the day time, and at night, so long as the moon was visible in the sky, so too would there be light enough to see by.

The darkness of the Dark Forest, however, was not a thing of visibility or the lack thereof. 

The ‘dark’ part of the Dark Forest was named such for something else entirely. 

To those who were not native to the villages which bordered the Dark Forest, the Forest itself was only remarkable for its massive size and the fact that said size was not being – and had not been – reduced whatsoever in anyone’s long-term memory. In an age where villages all over the continent were becoming towns which were becoming cities, where populations were increasing and therefore so were the fields needed to grow food to feed them on, where the sale of wood or the fur of animals who lived in wooded areas was one of the surest ways to grow rich, that such a large swath of woodland as the Dark Forest could stand entirely unmolested down to the scraggliest of pines was something that beggared disbelief. 

Visitors to these villages would look at the Forest and see timber that could be cut, prepared, and sold for a great fortune. They would see flat land perfect for expanding the village on or perhaps a perfect place to build a summer home or palace. They would see clear fields ideal for farming, complete with running streams where cattle or sheep may be raised by for a constant source of water that would never dry up. 

They would see all the potential that the Dark Forest held for profit and gain, but so too would they see that the villagers were not exploiting that potential. 

Rather, quite curious to these outsiders, the villagers who lived near the Forest would go out of their way to avoid it. 

When they needed wood to burn, they would travel far to other villages to buy it though the Forest was certainly full of wood enough for all of them and then some. When they needed meat, they would travel just as far and hunt or buy it elsewhere, though the Forest was populated by animals of all sorts. And when they needed to travel for these things, they would go all the way around the forest instead of cutting the quicker path straight through. 

When outsiders were brave enough to question the villagers about this odd behavior, the villagers would oblige to answer them without fail, almost eagerly so, like they were sharing the weight of a burden that they were rarely allowed to shoulder off.

“The Dark Forest is not a normal place,” these villagers would say in low voices, casting surreptitious glances around as though they were afraid the Forest itself might somehow be able to hear them. “It is an evil, godless stretch of land which has a heart as real as that of any man. The trees’ roots are the Forest’s veins and there is a putridity that runs through them instead of living blood, and because the forest has no real blood of its own, it thirsts for the blood of others. To set a single foot in the Forest is to be cursed to face torments that no man ought to face. The Forest sees and it knows and it is pleased to see man suffer and know that man’s pain. Nay, we do not tread there. We will step not a foot in, not to cut a tree or kill a deer much less to build a farm. The very soil of it is cursed and so is everything that grows from it, whether plant or animal or man-made shelter. I tell you, not even the devil himself would deign to live within those woods.”

The conversation always ended there for outsiders could think of nothing to say in response to such dire tales. Many of them who heard these warnings about the Dark Forest thought the villagers were mad. Others thought they were heretics for putting so much stock in superstition and thinking that any mere forest could be too much for those who truly believed in God’s power to walk through unharmed. 

Some, a rare few, even believed every word the villagers said. They had gazed at the Forest themselves or walked by it and heard the sound of leaves rustling like excited whispers. They had felt the malignancy of those woods in their very core as sure as they felt the heat of the sun or the cold caress of the wind. They had felt that they were being watched by the Forest just as they watched it and felt the hair stand straight on the back of their neck when they turned their backs to those trees. They knew in a place deep within them that there was something very wrong with the Dark Forest and knew well to avoid the place just as the villagers who lived next to it did.

However, it mattered little what outsiders thought of the tale of the Dark Forest in the end for the result was almost always they same: they avoided the Forest entirely. Not only the ones who believed what the villagers said, but those who didn’t. Even the ones who disbelieved the tale would rather be safe than sorry. They didn’t enter the Forest or go near it and if they happened to glance at it from the corner of their eye, they crossed themselves quickly and hurried to look away.

And so life in the villages of Verlassen and Nachbarin went on with the Dark Forest looming ever grand in front of and behind their village limits, respectively, and while occasionally a villager might stand at the edge of that Forest and look through the trees just so they could convince themselves they were brave, a shiver running down their spine as odd shapes and shadows flickered across their vision, they almost all knew better than to cross the line between Forest’s edge and go into the Forest itself. They almost all knew that they were better off turning their back on the Forest and continuing on their way and not turning back, not even when they could swear they felt someone – or something – standing right behind their shoulder, its arm reaching out, its finger extended and brushing just slightly against their back.

They  _ almost _ all knew better.

But the story that follows is about people who didn’t know better – or, perhaps, people who did know, but chose to do the wrong thing regardless of their knowledge. More than that, however, this is the story of the people who they did the wrong thing to, their very own children who entered the Dark Forest for no other reason than because they trusted their parents who led them there and who, through no fault of their own, suffered because of it.

  
  


*

At the farthest northern point of the village of Verlassen, before the village limits ended and the Dark Forest began, there lived a poor huntsman, his wife, and their two children. Their oldest child, a boy of twelve, was named Hansel, and the youngest child, a girl of ten, was named Gretel. 

It should be said that the reason the huntsman’s family was poor had nothing to do with a lack of skill or willpower on the part of the huntsman himself. The huntsman was skilled at the pursuit of wild game and there was no one more talented at the dressing of such meat. The huntsman was also a hard worker who strove, always, to fulfill his duties as the head of his household and it weighed heavily on his conscience when trying his best was simply not good enough.

In any other village, except perhaps for Nachbarin, the huntsman would have been more successful in his hunting and the story of Hansel and Gretel would have ended much differently indeed. 

However, the huntsman and his family did not live in any other village. They lived in Verlassen and the only place to hunt close to Verlassen was the Dark Forest which the villagers avoided like the plague.

The huntsman, therefore, was left with no other choice but to go outside of the limits of Verlassen if he wanted to hunt, but this came with troubles of its own. Other villages were reluctant to let this hunter from Verlassen use their land to hunt for this took food out of the mouths of their own people and took coin out of the pockets of their own hunters. 

“If you want to hunt here,” the mayors of these villages would say, “then you must pay a tax to do so! It is not that we have no sympathy for you and your plight, you see, but our good will cannot extend so far that we will starve so that you may be fed.”

And though the huntsman understood this logic and did not want the people of other villages to go hungry any more than these mayors did, the taxes were often much more than he could afford. More often than not, he ended up going home empty-handed, his family’s no more satiated and his coin pouch no more full than it was when he left. 

The people of Verlassen, too, were reluctant to buy meat from the huntsman of their own village when it was a simpler matter to simply buy their meat from hunters who lived elsewhere and who were willing to bring it to them once a week without them ever leaving home, so long as their coin was good for it.

“I’m sorry for your troubles,” his neighbors would tell him, “but I’m not a rich man myself. I’m getting a good deal from the huntsman in Flechse to keep my family in enough salted meat to throw into a pot of beans on occasion and I can afford little else. After you travel to these places, pay the taxes to hunt, get some game, prepare it, and bring it back, I’m sure your fee will be much more than I can possibly afford.” 

Therefore, though the huntsman dearly wanted to do his work for the good of both his pride and his family, the circumstances made it impossible for him to do so. Often, he and his wife, as well as his two young children, went hungry as a result. 

This despaired the huntsman to no end. He tossed and turned in his bed at night, unable to sleep for his worries of the future dominated his every waking thought while hunger gnawed at his belly like ants gnawing at a crumb of bread. 

“How will we feed the children this coming winter?” the huntsman lamented to his wife on one such night. “How will we feed  _ ourselves _ ?”

“I never wanted children in the first place,” the wife responded bitterly, her hunger keeping her from sleep just as it kept her husband. “It was your idea to have them and  _ now _ you worry me about how to feed them? Perhaps you should have thought of that before you insisted on how wonderful having a son running underfoot would be. Perhaps you should have thought of that some more when you insisted that every boy needs a sister so that he might know how to be a gentleman from the start.”

“But, wife –“

“No, husband,” the wife interjected angrily, “I am too tired to argue about this. I am too tired of continuing to go hungry just so that those two can eat the last crumbs out of our cupboards while we eat nothing but the dust that flies out when we open them to find them bare.”

“They are our children,” the huntsman tried to protest, but the huntsman had always been cowed by his wife and so his protest sounded halfhearted at best.

In any case, the huntsman’s wife was in no mood to be swayed. 

As she told her husband, she  _ was _ tired. Tired of motherhood and tired of poverty. Tired of living in Verlassen. Nothing of her life was how she imagined it would be when she was a little girl. Nothing of it was how her husband promised her it would be when they were young and courting. She longed to escape this horrible life of hers and unbeknownst to the huntsman, she had the means to do it. 

The wife still had some pieces of jewelry tucked away that she had inherited from her grandmother who had married much better than the wife herself had and she still had her wedding band which her husband had bought her during their courtship when he was less poor. The wedding band was made of real silver as the other jewelry was and the wife cherished it from the moment he gave it to her, but when their luck had turned years later and her husband wished to sell it along with his own so that he might feed the children, she had lied to him and told him she lost it. Her husband either believed her or was too cowardly to call her on her lie, but either way he never brought the subject up again. 

The huntsman’s wife thus kept her wedding band and her other precious jewels a secret from her husband for she knew that if he were aware of them he would sell them for food that the children would eat up in all of a month, if that. They would be starving again soon afterwards and nothing would be accomplished. It would all be a waste.

However, if they had no need to feed the children, then the price she could get for these jewels would be enough that she and the huntsman could leave Verlassen. They could afford to move to a better village where there was plenty of work for a huntsman to have and no need to pay a hefty tax in order to do it, and without two extra mouths to feed, they could afford to eat three meals a day, sleep on fine sheets, and do all that the wife had dreamed she would one day do when she was still young and innocent enough to dream pleasant dreams. 

None of that was possible if they still had the children, though. If the wife had only known what a burden they would become, she knew she would have insisted more readily twelve years ago that she had no desire to have them. The one time she gave in to her husband and look at where it got her – a decade later and she was suffering for it more than she had ever suffered before.

“They’re not our children, they’re our parasites,” the wife finally told her husband, not a trace of compassion in her voice, but only callousness. “We would be better off taking them into the Dark Forest and leaving them there rather than let them continue to eat what little we have that we could be eating ourselves.”

The huntsman was aghast. “We can’t do that! Even if the Dark Forest wasn’t cursed, how could we bring ourselves to do such a thing as to abandon our own flesh and blood in the middle of the woods,  _ any _ woods, but especially those?”

“And who says the Forest is cursed, husband? Village gossips, that’s who! Tell me, have any of them been into the forest and been cursed? Can any of them name a single person who has been in the forest? Is there any proof of this curse whatsoever?”

The huntsman was quiet for a long moment. “Nay, I cannot say that I can answer those questions, but...they are still our children. Surely you must have some care for them?”

“I have told you from the start I did not want them, did I not? And yet I went through horrible pain to bring them into the world and have spent much of my time since rearing them and how do they repay me? By eating us out of house and home! If we did not have them, we would not be so poor. We would not be tied to this hovel in this godforsaken village. We could leave and have the kind of life we always wanted to have somewhere else and yet these children keep us tied down like anchors keeping a sinking ship from reaching the shore so that some aboard might get off safely. No, husband. No more. Not for a single day more! In the morning we will take them into the Forest as deep as we dare and leave them. There is no curse in the Forest, mark my words, but even if there is, then surely it is no worse than the curse that is already upon us, brought on by those two.”

“Wife...I don’t think I can do what it is you’re suggesting.”

“You will,” the wife said with finality. “You have no other choice.  _ We _ have no other choice. It’s either them or us, and it cannot be them. I won’t allow it.”

And though the huntsman tried to protest all night and again in the morning before the children awakened, his wife would not be moved. 

And though the huntsman’s heart ached and his conscience screamed that it was the wrong thing to do, he was no more able to stand up to his wife in this instance than he was in any other. 

He and his wife would take their children into the Dark Forest as soon as they woke up, venturing as deep as they dared, and there they would give the children a drink of water laced with the juice of the small, perfectly round berries that grew around their home. The ones that were so dark a shade of red that one would think they were black unless they were crushed and you saw the bloody mess inside. The ones that the huntsman had always warned the children against ever so much as touching, much less eating, for they were a deadly fruit that not even the birds would eat. 

“It will be more merciful this way,” the wife told him when he balked at her new plan. “They will go to sleep quickly and then just simply never wake up. It is better than leaving them in the middle of the Forest to wander for days until they die from thirst or hunger. This way, they will never know what it is we have done.”

“But I’ll know,” the huntsman whispered, anguish churning in him as fiercely as any poison could.

“You’ll know what it’s like to not spend every second with hunger eating you alive from the inside out when they’re gone, too,” his wife shot back. “See how long your guilt will last in the face of three meals a day and knowing that the reason you’re getting them is because we no longer have the children to burden us. It won’t be long, I think.”

The huntsman said nothing, not wanting to raise his wife’s ire any more than he had, but privately he disagreed.

Privately, he thought the guilt he felt about this thing they were about to do would not leave him for as long as he lived, but even his certainty here wasn’t enough to make him brave enough to go against his wife.

As soon as the children woke and got dressed, they were out the door. 

The Dark Forest waited close by and with heavy steps, the huntsman crossed the threshold of it. His wife and children followed behind.

*

Gretel skipped through the Forest – or, at least, she tried to.

It was quite hard to skip with her fingers laced together with Hansel’s own, keeping them tethered as much as any rope, and with Hansel refusing to walk at anything but a sedate pace a few feet behind their parents who walked in front of them. Every time Gretel skipped forward a little, Hansel’s hand would pull her back so she was at his side, never letting her get further ahead than how far Hansel’s arm could stretch.

Gretel pouted at this, but made no move to pull her hand out of her brother’s. She liked holding Hansel’s hand, felt comforted by it, and nothing bothered her more than how Hansel would sometimes jerk his hand out of hers when the other boys from the village were around. 

“They’ll think I’m a baby if they see me holding your hand,” Hansel explained to her.

“Who cares what they think?” Gretel asked, for she surely didn’t care what any boy but Hansel thought about her.

Hansel obviously didn’t share that opinion. 

“ _ I _ care,” he told her, like it should have been obvious.

Gretel had frowned and said, “Well, you shouldn’t,” and Hansel had scoffed and shook his head at her like she was being stupid and then went to play with those village boys he apparently cared so much about – without Gretel who wasn’t invited along, who he explicitly told to stay home and help mother with dinner when she tried to follow him because “that’s girl’s work, Gretel, only boys are supposed to play around all day.”

Gretel hadn’t cared for that any more than she cared for what those boys might think of her. 

She also didn’t care for how Hansel was still going on about them even now.

“Wilhelm will never believe I’ve been into the Dark Forest!” Hansel crowed in an excited whisper. “I can’t wait to tell him!”

Gretel rolled her eyes. 

Wilhelm was fifteen and, in Gretel’s opinion, quite awful. His father owned the village pub and Wilhelm himself drank all the time from ale he stole from it. His belly was bloated from all the drinking which did nothing to improve his pockmarked face or his hair which he made greasy on purpose by slicking it back with lard. He had a spot in the middle of the street where he liked to lounge, spitting brown globs of phlegm right on the walkway, and making rude remarks to ladies who went by, dodging out of the way of his spit and shooting him dirty looks. 

Gretel thought he was the worst boy in all of Verlassen and perhaps all of the continent, but Hansel’s opinion was the total opposite of hers. He thought Wilhelm was amazing, the very picture of what a young man should be, and he’d even started emulating Wilhelm in certain ways like by chewing tobacco how Wilhelm did when he could get some of the boys to give him some or sipping on drink from a small jar he kept on himself, though Hansel had no access to ale and had to carry around small beer instead.

Gretel made a private promise to herself that if she ever caught Hansel putting lard in his hair, she’d shear it all off while he slept as an act of saving him from himself. She would hate to part her brother from his beautiful golden curls, but better he be bald than to go around dripping oil down his neck and stinking of animal fat. 

It would grow back, anyway. Eventually.

“Why do they call it the Dark Forest?” she asked Hansel, just as much out of curiosity as wanting to not have to hear about the  _ oh so amazing _ Wilhelm another time. “It’s not very dark here.”

In fact, it wasn’t dark at all. It was only early morning and the sun was barely at its highest point in the sky, but it seemed to Gretel that it shined more brightly here than it did above their house. She had been loath to leave so early when her mother suggested they take a family walk, but Hansel was so excited at the prospect of going into the Dark Forest and Gretel wasn’t in the habit of disobeying her mother, so she had dutifully went along with it. 

Now, Gretel was quite glad she had agreed even if she had only done so initially to please Hansel and because she didn’t want her mother to yell at her like she always did on occasions where Gretel didn’t do as she wanted or didn’t do as she wanted quickly enough or in the exact right way.

There were lots of plants in the Forest that Gretel had never seen before, which she really liked. Gretel quite fancied the idea of becoming a naturalist someday, but Hansel had told her that girls couldn’t do that sort of work, and when she’d asked her mother, she’d only scolded Gretel for ‘wasting her time with foolishness’. 

Hansel’s words had stung more than her mother’s had, truth be told, but he’d seen that she was upset and made it up to her by using the little bit of coin he’d saved up last winter shoveling snow from the village walkways to buy her an encyclopedia of plants from some old man who lived in the village, so Gretel forgave him as she always did when he messed up.

She wanted to run off into the Forest and get a closer look at the trees and all the plants growing around them so that should could memorize all she could about them and look them up in her book when she got home, but Hansel’s hand – and their parents’ warning for them to stay close to them – kept her from doing so. 

“It’s not called the Dark Forest because it’s  _ dark _ , Gretel,” Hansel scoffed. “It’s called that because it’s cursed. Not dark as in no light, but dark as in evil.”

Gretel’s face scrunched at that. It didn’t make any sense. “How can a forest be evil?”

“I dunno, but everyone says it is. They say if you just step one foot into the Dark Forest then horrible things will happen to you.”

Gretel hadn’t been counting her steps, too preoccupied with observing trees and the like, but she knew she’d stepped not one, but both feet into the Forest already. She and Hansel and their parents had all taken many more than just one step, too. More than a hundred steps by now, surely. Maybe more than a thousand.

“Well,  _ we’re _ fine,” she said. Obviously, she didn’t add, though the word was as clear in her voice as if she had spoken it out loud.

“I don’t believe in curses,” Hansel announced boldly. “Wilhelm says there’s no such thing as magic, evil or otherwise. He says grown ups just make up stories about evil witches and stuff to scare kids into doing what they want.”

“There’s magic in the Bible,” Gretel countered.

“Maybe I don’t believe in the Bible, either,” Hansel shot back. “Wilhelm says the Church is like grown ups, but worse. He says they make up all sorts of things to scare people into thinking they’re going to hell to make you give them all your money and when you don’t have any money left to give, they tell you you’re going to hell anyway for being poor. He says there’s more gold in the village chapel than in anyone’s house, but Father Jacob doesn’t do anything with it but spend it on himself and send some to Rome. He says it isn’t fair and one of these days some of us boys from the village ought to go in and take what he has and give it to the villagers because we’re the ones who gave it all to Father Jacob anyway, so really it’s ours to take back.”

Gretel pursed her lips in displeasure. She didn’t care about church things all that much herself, either, for all that she went to services regularly, but it galled her to hear Hansel repeating Wilhelm’s words as though they were made of gold as much as any coin would have been. 

Peeved, Gretel said, “If Wilhelm steals from the chapel, he’s going to go to hell faster than anyone. They’ll burn him for it quicker than he can spend whatever he gets and they’ll burn you, too, if you help him.”

“Verlassen doesn’t burn people,” Hansel dismissed, but Gretel could detect a hint of wavering in his voice that told her he hadn’t been able to dismiss it entirely.

“The Church does,” Gretel responded. The part of her that was so annoyed that Hansel had brought up Wilhelm had her adding almost gleefully, “Father Jacob said that people who commit crimes against the Pope should be given a traitor’s execution and since all priests work for the Pope then stealing from the chapel would be a crime against him. Do you know what that means?”

Gretel could hear the click from Hansel’s throat as he swallowed and feel the tension in him from how tightly he held her hand. 

“No,” he said. Then, almost as though the question was being pulled out of him against his will, he asked, “What does it mean?”

“They tie you up to a horse, first, and drag you behind it for awhile,” Gretel said, using the hand that Hansel wasn’t holding to tick the steps off. “Then if you’re still alive, they get a giant metal spike that’s really pointy at the end and they make you  _ sit _ on it, and  _ then _ if you’re still alive they cut off your privates and then cut out your heart and make you look at it and then they burn you. I think they burn you whether you’re still alive or not, but sometimes they burn you first and do all the other stuff after.”

Gretel tried to keep walking, but jerked to a stop as Hansel had stopped walking himself. She turned to face him and notice the pale, chalky pallor of his face as though all the blood had left it. His grip on Gretel’s hand was very tight, to the point of hurting. 

“You’re lying,” Hansel protested. “Father Jacob wouldn’t say all that with kids in the room. You’re making it all up.”

“I am not!” Gretel hotly denied. “All Father Jacob talks about is hell this and executions that and how we’re supposed to report heretics to him so that we don’t end up being executed and going to hell with them. You would know if you ever bothered to come to church instead of spending all your time with stupid Wilhelm!”

Hansel’s chest puffed out and his face flushed red. He yelled at Gretel, “Wilhelm isn’t stupid!  _ You’re _ stupid!”

“At least I know how to  _ read _ !” Gretel snapped with indignation to hide how that insult had actually hurt. “Wilhelm can’t even read his own name! He can’t even  _ write  _ it!”

“Children!” her father’s voice suddenly shouted from some ways away, cutting off whatever Hansel might have said next. “Over here! We found a nice clearing to take a rest in!”

Gretel heard Hansel’s sharp intake of breath and saw how his cheeks went hollow as he bit down on the insides of them. He glared fiercely at Gretel and then took off, walking quickly past her, knocking his shoulder roughly into hers as he did, and because Gretel’s hand was still crushed in his grip, she was forced to follow after as he all but dragged her along behind him.

Their parents were about a minute’s walk away from them even at Hansel’s quick pace and even through her upset, Gretel could admit the clearing they waited in was a nice one.

It was a wide, ovular space in the center of a copse of skinny trees. The ground was perfectly flat and covered in a thick layer of leaves in every shade of orange, gold, yellow, and brown one could think of, and in the very center of the clearing, where Hansel and Gretel’s parents sat waiting, was a large rock the color of rain clouds. The stone was short, but with a large surface area that was as flat as the ground. It looked like a table or, perhaps, a very hard bed sans sheets and pillows. Hansel and Gretel’s parents were using it as a seat, sitting there with a good deal of space between them. 

It seemed impossible to Gretel that a stone like that could have ended up in a clearing like this naturally, but as she couldn’t think of any reason someone would drag such a thing here – much less how one would go about dragging something that must have been very heavy so far, for that matter – she put the thought in the back of her mind, storing it there to explore later.

Hansel dragged Gretel right up to the stone and released her hand as though it had suddenly burned him in order to huffily throw himself down on it, taking up the space closest to her father. 

Gretel held back her frown and sat more calmly down in the remaining space between Hansel and her mother, her bottom on very the edge of the stone. She angled her body away from her mother’s, but there wasn’t enough space to allow them not to touch. Gretel could feel her mother’s leg pressed flush to hers and she disliked it. She scooted in closer to Hansel even though she had no real desire to be closer to Hansel right now as she was quite irked with him, but the thought of being pressed close to her mother was much worse. 

It left Gretel with the same feeling of discomfort physical contact between them always caused, that felt like a mix of being lightly choked and having ants crawl along her skin. The feeling was mild enough not hurt but present enough to be noticeable and Gretel had never liked it. 

Hansel was the better option between them, irk or no irk, but it was impossible to get away from her mother entirely without getting up and refusing to sit. Such an act would be too noticeable, however, and so she remained where she was, grit her teeth, and tried to ignore the heaviness in her chest that came from the feeling of her mother’s body against her own.

“I thought we heard yelling. I hope you two weren’t fighting,” her father scolded in that soft way of his that wasn’t really much of a scold at all but still always left Gretel feeling guiltier than any of her mother’s screams or threats to use the switch on her ever could nonetheless

“No, father,” Gretel lied before Hansel could, hoping her father wouldn’t see the heat rising in her cheeks, “we were just talking loudly.”

He didn’t notice. 

“Well...good, then. I’m glad. I’ve always wanted my children to get along and I’m...I’m so happy that you and your brother are so close, sweetheart.” 

Her father smiled, but Gretel thought there was something halfhearted about it. He seemed distracted and his smile was more dim than it usually was, a touch sad and distant in a way that Gretel didn’t like and that made some funny feeling happen in the hollow in her throat that was something like how she felt when she was angry at Hansel, but not quite the same. 

The feeling was less severe, but somehow more distressing. Anger was a tightening, but this was more of a flex, like something inside of her was being wringed like a wet cloth.

Gretel didn’t like that, either. She was beginning to regret coming to the Dark Forest after all and wished she’d pretended to be ill so that she could stay home.

Next to her, her mother cleared her throat rather loudly and the sound made Gretel and her father both flinch, the latter more strongly than Gretel had.

“It’s been a long walk,” her mother said, her tone prim. She reached into the pack she carried at her side to pull out two water skins. “You two must be thirsty.”

“I guess,” Hansel replied and took the skin that her mother held out for him. Despite his noncommittal reply, he wasted no time in undoing the top and bringing the skin to his mouth and taking a long pull from the container that seemed like it would never end. It did end, though, and Hansel’s lips smacked wetly when he pulled the skin from his mouth.

“Gretel?” Her mother held the second skin out to her and though Gretel was hardly thirsty, she took it, not wanting to anger her mother and knowing the smallest things could do it regardless of what Gretel wanted. 

For that same reason, as her mother looked pointedly at Gretel after she took the skin, Gretel undid the top and took a drink of it herself. Not as large a drink as Hansel’s, but enough of a gulp that it made her mother take her probing gaze off of Gretel as though satisfied she’d been obeyed.

Gretel put the top back on the water skin the second her mother’s eyes were off of her and held the thing between her thighs. The water was refreshing in a way as it had been quite a long walk and her throat had been parched, but it was also bitter. The taste made Gretel wonder if her mother had bothered to boil it before putting it in the skins. Such chores usually fell to Gretel to do, so she wouldn’t be surprised if her mother had skipped it. She just hoped she wouldn’t get sick from it, as unboiled water was known to make people rather ill. 

“Father,” she spoke up after a few moments of silence went by and no one else seemed to be in any hurry to break it, “is it true that the Dark Forest is cursed?”

Her father didn’t hear her at first as he was too busy watching Hansel drain the rest of his water skin with that sad look on his face somehow deepening, though Gretel could not guess what was putting such an expression on him. She repeated her question, louder this time to get his attention, and finally he looked away from Hansel and blinked at her as though he’d just woken up from a daze.

“Cursed? Well, yes, that is what people say,” he answered, “but I know little about it other than the stories they share in the village. Whether those stories are true or not is anyone’s guess.”

“But why would anyone say it if it isn’t true?” Gretel asked.

“Oh, come on,” Hansel interrupted, laughing as though all of his previous ire with Gretel was gone. Knowing Hansel, Greta thought it likely was. Her brother wasn’t someone who could hold on to his anger for long. A light breeze was enough to blow even his worse tempers away away. “Everyone loves a ghost story!”

“ _ I _ don’t,” Gretel said, just to be contrary. She’d always been better at holding a grudge than Hansel was. “And anyway, what do ghosts have to do with whether the Forest is cursed or not?”

“Whenever people say a place is cursed, it’s always about ghosts,” Hansel said, apparently an expert on the subject.

“Like when?”

“Like the field the last English king died in when his brother smashed his head open or that tower up north where they say those two princes died or...”

Gretel tuned Hansel’s voice out as he set about listing out all the places he could remember ever being cursed by ghosts, having little interest in the subject even though she knew she had gotten him started in the first place. She focused on studying the leaves on the ground instead, the shapes and colors of them, so that she might look them up in her book later. 

Gretel didn’t know how long she sat there studying leaves, Hansel’s voice an indefinable but familiar noise in the background, her father a shape in the corner of her eye, and her mother a noticeable but ignored presence next to her. 

She just knew that at a certain point she blinked and her vision suddenly hazed in her eyes, the leaves she was studying going from layers of distinct shapes to a single brown blur. She knew that she yawned, suddenly very sleepy, her vision going blurrier with every heavy blink.

And then she knew that she blinked once more and her eyelids wouldn’t lift again. 

Sleep pulled at Gretel as physically as any hands, dragging her gently beneath its heavy cover. 

The last thing Gretel knew was her head lolling off to the side and landing on Hansel’s shoulder, and then Gretel didn’t know anything at all.

*

The Forest knows the body as if it is inside of it. 

The Forest knows the body as if it is outside of it.

The Forest watches and listens and smells and feels the body with the closest of attentions, from the inside out.

The body comes to wakefulness of a kind, sudden and sharp, but without awareness.

The body is gasping, choking, coughing, gagging. 

There is a tickle in the bottom of the throat of the body like a fish hook caught on flesh, pulling up, pulling painfully, ripping, tearing, rending.

Hard flatness is against the body’s back and the body is choking, choking,  _ choking _ . 

The body turns to the side, stomach burning, stomach aching,  _ throat  _ burning.

The body spews bile, vinegar sour, up the throat and out the mouth, all over the lips and hair.

The body coughs and gags and spits. 

The body smells a scent like decomposed flesh, acrid-sweet, and gags more at it, coughing, dry-heaving, gasping, until nothing is left in the body’s stomach to come up but sour air.

The body’s stomach is aching, thighs cramping. 

Everything hurts the body as it gasps and heaves, even the very act of gasping and heaving.

The body feels hands pulling it down, but they are only the hands of sleep.

The body tries to fight it, tries to stay awake, but it can’t.

The body’s eyes roll back, shutting, sightless.

The body’s consciousness flees.

Above the body, the Forest.

Around the body, the Forest.

Beneath the body, the Forest. 

The Forest submerges itself into the body’s pain with a rapture that is building, a rapture that will reach climax when the body expires as most of the bodies which have penetrated the Forest before have expired. 

When the body persists, however, the Forest feels not disappointment, but anticipation.

The Forest is old. 

The Forest is patient. 

The Forest knows the joy of savoring its prey. 

*

Gretel woke to the sun cooking her face and a hurt in her body that permeated all over, its focal point in her stomach where she felt like she’d been stabbed repeatedly.

She opened her eyes and cringed as she looked directly into the sun above her head. She shut them quickly and tightly and kept them that way while she tried to sit up.

‘Tried’ being the important word. Sitting up was a trial. It felt like the hardest thing Gretel had ever done. Her stomach protested the whole time, burning and aching from the inside out. Her legs shook with the effort. Gretel swallowed hard and her throat burned, too, painfully as though she’d swallowed acid. There was a taste in her mouth that was rank, more disgusting than anything Gretel had ever tasted. Swallowing made the taste worse, made her taste an acidic twinge on the very back of her tongue that seemed to hold a physical presence that she could only liken to a layer of fuzz or hair.

Gretel opened her eyes and spat on the ground to get rid of the taste and felt her heart seize in her chest when the spit that landed on the golden leaves was a dark bloody red. 

It was never a good sign when blood came out of anything other than a cut. 

Gretel was no physician, but she had heard villagers repeat that old adage often enough and she knew it to be wise. Spitting blood or seeing it when you relieved yourself were what people did when they were very ill, and it was almost always a sign that a physician was needed. Even if Gretel’s stomach and throat didn’t hurt so badly, she would know that, but looking around and seeing nothing but trees, Gretel knew there was no physician to be found anywhere close to here.

It took Gretel more than a few moments to recognize her surroundings as the clearing her parents had stopped at during their walk and notice that the hard, uncomfortable surface she was sitting on was in fact the same large stone they had all been sitting on before.

It took a few more seconds to notice her parents were nowhere in sight. 

It took just a second more to notice that Hansel was.

Gretel flinched and her body throbbed in pain with the sudden jolt when her eyes landed on Hansel sitting on the stone just a few feet away from her, as quiet and still as the grave. 

However badly Gretel felt, Hansel was surely the mirror to it in physical form. 

His skin was as pale as chalk and there were dark indentations under his eyes. His golden hair looked a dull brown, all luster gone, and he sat in such a way that his shoulders were slumped, his hands held palm up in his lap and his eyes downcast on them. He looked a horrible fright and Gretel had to forcibly slow her breathing so that her heart would not burst out of her chest at the sight of him.

“Hansel,” she said when the worst of her surprise had gone away. Her brother’s name was so gritty in her voice, however, that she had to clear her throat before she could say anything more. She longed for a drink of water, even the bitter water her mother had given them before, but Gretel saw as much of a sign of the water skins as she did their parents: none. “Hansel, why didn’t you say something when I woke up? I didn’t even know you were there and I feel so – so  _ awful _ . I think I’m sick, where – where are mother and father? How long have we been here alone?”

Hansel didn’t respond.

He didn’t move.

He didn’t even seem to breathe.

Gretel’s heartbeat skipped in her chest. 

“Hansel?”

Slowly, Hansel’s head lifted and then jerkily, it turned until he was looking at Gretel. 

His brown eyes were as dull as his hair, some indefinable light missing from them. He looked at her, but Gretel felt as though he may as well have been looking through her. His eyes were turned in her direction, but there was no reaction in them. They were as alive as marbles made of glass, not the eyes that sparkled with mischief that she was used to.

“Gretel,” Hansel mouthed without sound. His lips and tongue made the right shapes, but no noise came out. He did it almost like he was testing the word out, like it was the first time he’d ever said – or tried to say – Gretel’s name at all, though Gretel knew her brother had said her name a thousand times upon a thousand times before.

She inhaled shakily and winced at how her throat stung, at how dry it was. Her pulse fluttered alarmingly in her chest, a skittering beat that seemed apt to stop at any time.

“Hansel,” Gretel said slowly, even as the panic began to swell within her, “where are mother and father?”

Hansel was silent, peering at her without expression.

“What happened?” she tried.

Hansel blinked a slow, unnatural blink. Gretel would need the fingers on both hands and then some to count the seconds it took for his eyelids to fall down and then rise up again.

“My stomach hurt,” Hansel mouthed soundlessly again, forcing Gretel to stare at his lips in order to understand the words he was trying to make, “and then it stopped.”

The finality in the words made Gretel’s breathing hitch. “And then what? What happened after that?”

Hansel blinked again, just as slow, but no more words followed. 

“Hansel, what’s wrong with you?” Gretel tried to shout at him, but it came out as a whisper instead. Her own voice was unable to rise enough to a shout with how fear was gripping her by the throat. “Why won’t you speak properly? Don’t you know where mother and father are?”

A blink was his only reply.

“Do you know how we can get home?”

A blink.

“Do you know how we can get  _ anywhere _ ?”

“Yes,” mouthed Hansel, and then Gretel was the one who blinked.

She sniffled and that burned just as much as swallowing and breathing did. She stared at Hansel and the way he stared at her, something almost bird-like in the tilt of his head, the emptiness of his eyes. 

Gretel had never liked birds. You couldn’t predict a bird the way you could another animal. Cats purred or hissed, dogs’ tails wagged or their ears went back, but you never knew whether a bird liked you or not until it was already pecking your eyes out.

“Where? Where else is there to go?” Gretel asked, because there was nothing else to do. 

Gretel had hardly paid attention to the direction they took from home to this part of the Forest, too busy looking at the plants rather than the way they were walking, and if Hansel didn’t know then she knew she would be lost soon enough if she picked a direction and started walking. 

Going south back to Verlassen or even north to Nachbarin would be smart, but Gretel had no compass and she had seen no moss on any of the trees in the Forest. Picking a random direction and hoping to find enough moss so that she could make her way north seemed even more foolish than picking a random direction hoping to find the exact path home.

Hansel’s mouth did nothing in response to this question, either, but he gave an answer of sorts. He stood up and started to walk into the woods.

Two beats later, realizing he wasn’t going to stop and wait for her, Gretel jumped up from the stone and bit her tongue because of the pain the sudden movement caused her. She hurried up to Hansel’s side on legs that were in no mood to be walking and made herself breathe deep and evenly so that they wouldn’t collapse underneath her, though breathing hurt quite a bit, too.

She had no other choice, however. She could either go with Hansel or be left behind and Gretel was terrified at the prospect of being completely alone, so with Hansel it was.

She glanced at Hansel from the side as they walked, silent save for the sound of leaves crunching underfoot, and felt a lump lodge itself in her aching throat at the blank expression on his pallid face. She glanced behind her and though she could no longer make out the stone slab in the clearing, a voice in her head told her to go back, that she was safer going back even if she’d be alone, that where her brother was going was nowhere she wanted to be, and that something was very, very wrong here.

Gretel ignored the voice and turned back to the Forest in front of her. 

She didn’t know where their parents were, but she still had Hansel, and she had always relied on her brother more than their parents anyway. She didn’t always like him, but she did always love him, and Gretel knew that if she couldn’t trust Hansel, then she couldn’t trust anyone.

And so Gretel, with Hansel at her side, walked on.

*

The pain and burning in Gretel’s stomach didn’t subside so much as it plateaued to a level she got used to after awhile. Walking did nothing to make it worse after a certain point, but neither did it give her a chance to rest so that the feelings might lessen. Her legs ached as she walked, too, and felt like they were made of solid, dead rock, while her feet were sore in her shoes and her mouth and throat felt as dry as sand.

But as long as Hansel walked, Gretel had no choice but to go with him or to remain behind and become lost in the Forest with no one to help her. As she followed Hansel’s lead, however, Gretel tried to fight her growing fear that helping her wasn’t what Hansel was doing for the brother who led her deeper into the woods did not behave like the brother Gretel had always known. 

Hansel was silent as he walked and his mouth made no move to open when Gretel tried to speak to him. She asked him where they were going, but Hansel would not answer. She asked again after their parents and where they had gone, but he still would not answer. Not even insulting Wilhelm and telling Hansel how the boy would make fun of him when he got back and learned how he was lost in the woods provoked her brother into saying a word or changing his expression in any way. 

His mouth did not open. His lips did not twitch. Hansel had not so much as glanced at her.

It was all so unlike Hansel that it worried Gretel greatly and made her afraid. It also made the little voice inside of her that told her something was wrong all the more loud. 

It didn’t help any that Gretel had no idea where they were going or that along with her growing fear over Hansel’s behavior, she was also consumed with suspicion that they might have been walking in circles all along. 

She hadn’t noticed anything was odd other than Hansel’s behavior until they passed through a clearing that looked identical to the one they had first been in with their parents except that the stone table, that clearing’s most identifiable feature, was absent. The clearing they passed through then was the same size, though, and the same shape, and the trees around it all looked the same and so did the leaves on the ground. 

Gretel had thought herself mad at first, that it was just a coincidence, and they passed through it, but later they went through another clearing that looked the same.

And then another.

And then another. 

On the fifth time they entered such a clearing, Gretel was more worried than ever and stopped in the center of it. 

Hansel didn’t stop. He didn’t falter. He didn’t slow down. 

Gretel bit her bottom lip, nerves tightening her throat, shifting nervously on her feet. Finally she crouched down on the ground, hissing when it made her stomach cramp sharply. With wide movements of her hands, she scooped the leaves on the ground off to the sides, pushing them away until she had cleared away a circle of space where she could see the soil that made up the Forest floor. 

That done, Gretel rose and blinked away the stars that danced in her vision as she did. She brushed the dirt on her hands off on her dress and hurried after Hansel who didn’t so much as glance her way when she caught up to him, breathless just from that short jaunt. 

They walked on. 

Gretel was filled with dread that she was right and that they were going in circles after all and anxious over what that might mean. At the same time, however, she told herself she was being silly, paranoid, mad like those women that got locked up in convents until they were old and grey. 

She told herself that the boy next to her was her brother and that Hansel would never do her any harm. She repeated this in her mind like a prayer. He might have harsh words for her on occasion and he might sometimes leave her behind at home to go play with boys who weren’t good enough to lick his boots, but he would never  _ hurt _ her or lead her astray. Not truly. No matter how strange he was acting.

Gretel told herself this until they walked into another clearing that looked identical to all the others. She told herself until she made her way to the center of the clearing where she looked down and saw, as plain as could be, a circle of space where the soil of the Forest floor was bare and all the leaves had been pushed away.

*

Gretel’s breath caught in her throat and remained there until breathing became necessary and her held breath escaped her mouth with sudden force. 

A strangled, startled noise escaped with it. 

Gretel could do nothing but stare at that cleared circle of space in disbelief, her heartbeat pounding wildly in her chest, confusion and fear twining like dancers spinning a mad pace in her head to a cacophony of white noise.

They had been going in circles after all, she realized. This was her proof of it. But why would Hansel – ?

Gretel’s head jerked up, her sight tearing brutally away from the bare soil spot on the ground. She meant to glare at her brother, to go up to him and yell at him and demand answers. She meant to push Hansel if she had to, to hit him, to scream at him to stop whatever joke he was playing on her and take them home.

Gretel meant to confront her brother and to do so meanly, but when her head snapped up, Hansel was nowhere in sight. 

Another startled sound escaped Gretel, a sound almost like a sob. She swore that her heart had actually stopped beating in her chest for a full second before slamming back into rhythm with force enough to hurt. With the renewed beating came a strong wave of fear. 

Gretel spun around in a circle, making herself dizzy as she did, looking for Hansel in every direction, but nowhere she looked did she see him. She didn’t see his back walking away from her or his face as he returned to get her. She finally stopped spinning and stood perfectly still. She shut her eyes and forced her gasping breaths to slow. It took a few seconds, but when finally Gretel’s breaths were as silent as she could make them, she strained her hearing and listened to the Forest.

She hoped to catch the sound of leaves being tread on by Hansel’s feet, branches being snapped by his shoes. She hoped to hear some sign of Hansel or, if not her brother, then anyone, anyone at all. Gretel desperately wanted to hear some evidence that she was not alone in the Forest, that there was someone else in these trees who she might go to and ask for help.

Gretel heard none of that. 

All Gretel heard was the sound of leaves, not on the ground but high and still attached to the trees, moving in a light breeze. It was just a whisper of a sound, a sound akin to that of paper shuffling or mice skittering across the floor. Deep beyond that, off to the east, Gretel heard something like a gurgle, a bubbling, perhaps from a stream or other body of water. 

She heard no footsteps, no voices, not so much as a cough or a sneeze. She didn’t even hear birdsong or the chatter of other animals that made the woods their home.

Gretel opened her eyes. She once again moved in a circle, this time more slowly than before. She looked every which way she could as if she expected Hansel to have suddenly appeared without her hearing him. She even looked up, wondering if perhaps he’d somehow, in some impossible way, managed to get into the trees.

It was all for naught, however, as she still saw not a trace of her brother or any other soul. Not a person or even an animal. There was nothing around her but the trees. 

Gretel was, as far as she could see, entirely alone.

She began to cry.

Gretel had never liked crying. She had never liked the way her throat got tight and painful or how her nose got stopped up as though she had a cold. She had never liked how crying made her feel small and weak or how even when she cried alone, evidence of her crying would be blatant afterwards in the roughness of her voice and the little red spots like freckles that always popped up around her eyes for anyone to hear and see. 

She had never liked it before and she didn’t like it now, either, but still Gretel cried. She couldn’t help it.

She stood there sobbing as quietly as she could, putting her fist in her mouth and harshly biting down on her knuckles to stifle the noise. Her already sore throat ached even more fiercely. Her nose became clogged and made a harsh scraping sound when she tried to breathe past the blockage. Tears leaked from her eyes and ran cold trails down her cheeks that she took her fist from her mouth to swipe roughly away.

Gretel cried and cried until eventually, with a shuddering inhale, she was able to slow the force of it all. Her already quiet sobs died down to hitching breaths. Her throat relaxed some of its tightness, leaving only a raw ache behind. Her tears stopped and her eyes were left wet and itchy. Looking around at the empty Forest made despair rise in Gretel’s throat again, making her want to resume her crying once more, but she was able to stop herself before she teetered entirely off the edge.

“Alright,” she said to herself, her voice rough and nasally from her tears. She took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly. “Alright.”

Gretel kept her breathing even and steeled herself. She made herself think about things rationally, to be smart like she knew she was. 

Okay, then. Here she was, thinking. 

She was alone in the Dark Forest, there was no changing that, but Gretel knew she couldn’t just stay where she stood and hope that someone might happen to stumble across her. No one from Verlassen ever came to the Forest that she knew of, not until her parents brought she and Hansel here on their walk. 

Gretel could wait forever and still no one would come, and Gretel didn’t have forever. She was already thirsty and the only reason her hunger wasn’t driving her mad was that she was used to being hungry by now and her stomach still ached, but she knew she would need to drink and eat something sooner rather than later. 

Neither could she count on Hansel to come back for her. 

She didn’t know what was wrong with Hansel, but she knew that he was behaving very strangely, almost as though he were another person entirely. The normal Hansel would never just leave Gretel alone in a strange place. He might pretend to as a joke, maybe, hiding behind a tree for awhile before popping back out or something like that, but he would never actually do it for real. 

There was nothing normal about how Hansel had been when Gretel last saw him, however. 

Gretel wondered if perhaps he had been ill with whatever made her sick before and he was behaving in such a way because of that, if maybe the illness had addled his mind. Gretel remembered her father telling them before that some sicknesses could make people behave unlike themselves, like that illness some animals got that made them foam at the mouth and act very mean that they could give to people if they scratched or bit you. 

Hansel hadn’t been mean, exactly, just quiet and weird, and he hadn’t been foaming at the mouth, but Gretel wondered if maybe he might have that illness or something like it. Her father always told them to mind how wild animals behaved to be safe, but Hansel didn’t always listen to father like he should’ve. He could have been bitten by something or scratched out in these woods. It could have made him act like that.

Gretel couldn’t know for sure, though. She just knew that she couldn’t predict what might be going through Hansel’s mind and so she couldn’t predict for sure that he would come back for her. Even if he wanted to, the Dark Forest was new to both of them. Hansel might turn back to look for her and get even more lost than Gretel was now.

So if Gretel could not stay where she was, that meant she had to go. 

But that was easier said than done.

She looked around the copse of trees that surrounded her and mentally acknowledged the trees at her back. North, south, east, or west. Northeast or northwest. Southeast or southwest. A straight path or a zigzagging one. Gretel had a seemingly endless list of options for which direction she could go and how she might go about it, but what she lacked was a destination she should head towards. 

Her nerves told her that she needed to get out of the Forest, to get back to Verlassen, but Gretel knew in her head that getting food and water were more important. She’d never get back home if she was too hungry and thirsty to walk the way back, whatever the way back was.

Water was the main priority among the two. Gretel remembered her father telling her that people could go much longer without food than they could without water. 

“A grown man can survive for years on bread crumbs alone,” he’d told her once when she had complained about her own hunger and asked him when they might have some food, “and a little girl can go even longer. When you’re hungry, sweetheart, and there’s nothing to eat then just drink as much as you can. You can go years with only crumbs, but just days without water. Don’t forget that, alright?”

Gretel had refrained from pointing out at the time that their family hadn’t even any bread crumbs to eat much less a whole loaf of bread, because she hadn’t wanted to make her father feel bad, but she’d remembered his wisdom then as she did everything else he ever told her. 

Off to the east, the sound of gurgling water, once faint, seemed to grow louder. The source of that noise suddenly seemed much closer by, though Gretel knew that streams of water couldn’t suddenly creep forward like that. 

Maybe her thirst was just making the sound louder, her mind giving her a hint of which way she should go. 

Still, Gretel hesitated. There was still a pervasive feeling hanging all about her like a blanket of fog. It made her feel like something was very wrong in Dark Forest. Gretel didn’t believe in curses any more than Hansel or the dreaded Wilhelm did, not really, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that the Forest was not quite right. It didn’t make her feel what a normal forest was supposed to feel like.

The water gurgled louder, so loud that it sounded like the source of it was running right by Gretel’s ear. She flinched and the volume decreased immediately. Gretel tried to swallow down her fright, but still her heart was racing.

Yes, there was something wrong with this place, but Gretel was no bird who could simply fly away, up and out of it. She would have to walk one step at a time and she needed water if she were going to do that, and so Gretel took a deep breath. She steeled herself. She began to walk to the east, towards the sound of the water.

She stopped after a few strides, however, and turned back to look at the place where she had stood. Back to that circle spot on the ground where she’d cleared away some leaves. Gretel bit her lip, thinking, and then faced forward again. She looked down on the ground and with her right foot, she started to kick the leaves on the ground off to the side, scraping them away until the dark soil beneath was revealed. 

It was no circle like she made before, but it was a big enough space of cleared ground that it was easily noticeable among all the rest of the leaf covered floor. It would have to do. Gretel started walking again, but every now and then she would stop and clear away the leaves just like that, leaving a trail of cleared spaces behind her like they were stepping stones in a garden. 

The ovular clearing was the closest thing to a familiar spot Gretel had in the Forest and she wanted a way to track herself back to it if she needed to. It made her feel somewhat less lost to do this and that helped settle some of Gretel’s fear.

And so, like that, Gretel continued on. 

The sound of water beckoned.

*

Gretel walked past pines barely taller than she was, skinny things with rough grey bark and needles as green as grass growing sparsely from their branches. She walked past evergreens, those great trees of winter with berries the color of frosted robin blue. She walked past oaks, the giants of the forest whose trunks were as wide as any bear. 

In any other situation, Gretel might have been happy to be where she was for the natural world of plants was her favorite place to be. She might have gone up to the trees and inspected them, wishing she had vellum and charcoal so that she could draw them and write down their every feature. She might have been happy for the opportunity just to look at them up close and for the quiet that came with such observation. 

On this day, however, Gretel barely glanced at her surroundings at all. All of her attention was focused on following the sound of bubbling water like a mouse following a piper’s tune and on clearing small spaces on the ground to mark her direction by when she stopped to make them. 

Time didn’t seem to matter. The position of the sun in the sky, gradually going lower, was not noticed. 

All that Gretel could focus on was following the noise. 

A part of her relished in that focus, in being so single-minded about something, because it allowed her to forget about all the rest of her feelings. It let Gretel forget her worry about Hansel and her parents and where they had gone for a time. It let her put pause to her fears about whether she would ever see her home again. 

Things hadn’t been perfect at home, true. Gretel went hungry most of the time and they never had money for things, and her mother was never very nice to her, either, but Gretel still longed to be back there again. It wasn’t perfect, but it was familiar and familiarity felt safe. Even her mother’s indifference was nothing compared to being truly and utterly alone as she was now in a place that was so unknown to her and so it was no surprise that Gretel had no desire to dwell on it for long.

But as the sound of bubbling water grew louder, Gretel’s focus began to slip and trepidation took its place.

If she reached the water, she would have something to drink, but what would she do afterwards? Where would she go? If she didn’t make it out of the Forest before nightfall, where would she sleep? What kind of animals were there in the Forest and could they be dangerous? Could they make her sick like they might’ve made Hansel? Were there bears here or perhaps even wolves? 

Gretel knew the answer to none of these questions and her lack of knowledge gnawed at her with teeth as sharp as those of any hunger, leaving indentations that bled with fear behind in the places it had chewed. Her nerves only grew worse as she walked and it continued to grow until she came out of a space between the trees and at last found the source of the water she had been following.

There, Gretel stopped in her tracks and stared. 

She found herself in yet another clearing, but she knew this one was not the same as the one she’d started off from before at a glance. This clearing was an ovular space, too, but halfway in it was cut in half by a body of water that was perhaps fifteen feet across. The water itself looked like it might be chest-deep and there was a short dock made of a dark, wet looking brown wood leading from the leaf-strewn ground to the water itself.

And there at the dock were two things Gretel didn’t expect to see at all. She couldn’t even say which surprised her the most. 

The first thing was the boat. It was a small vessel made of the same wood as the dock with what looked like the carving of a some sort of long-beaked bird on its prow, the creature large with its head reared in an imperious expression and wings spread wide. Though the water flowed around the boat quickly enough to be audible, the boat was totally unaffected by the flow. It only sat by the dock without swaying or rocking like an obedient dog might sit unmoving at its master’s side.

The second thing was Hansel. Gretel’s brother stood at the farthest end of the dock facing Gretel as though he’d been waiting for her all the while. 

Gretel’s heartbeat spiked in her chest at the sight of him from more than just surprise. She also felt fright. 

Hansel was even paler than he was before, whiter than chalk with a waxy sheen like newly made soap across his skin. His posture was slouched the way an old man’s might be, hunchbacked as though standing straight was beyond his spine’s capacity. His hair was missing in clumps in several places and hanging just a breath away from falling in others. The dark spots under his eyes seemed sunken in, blacker than ever. 

Those spots reminded Gretel of rotten plums and she had a thought that if she put a finger on one of those spots and pushed down it would sink right past the skin to the bone beneath like it was nothing. She had to swallow back bile at the thought, feeling ill at the image her mind projected. She felt sicker still at the very real image on Hansel just feet away from her. 

“Hansel?” Gretel asked in disbelief. She took a wary step forward and then stopped. Some invisible force like a rope tethered around her neck and pulled taut kept her from getting closer. “...Hansel? Is that you?”

“Gretel,” Hansel’s voice came out papery soft, carried on a breeze that raised the flesh on Gretel’s arms, while his mouth remained closed, his lips unmoving. 

Gretel’s pulse jumped again. Her legs ached not with exhaustion but with the burning imperative to turn around and run, to follow the trail she had made and go back to that clearing she had come from.

But Gretel did not run. She couldn’t. The same invisible force that kept her from walking closer to Hansel before now seemed to have transformed itself into hands pressing down on her shoulders, keeping her rooted in place. Her whole body felt frozen. It felt stiff. Even blinking seemed impossible.

Gretel’s mouth still worked, however. Her voice somehow had the strength to work when the rest of her body had no strength at all.

“Hansel,” Gretel called out. “Hansel, what has happened to you?”

“It’s time to go, Gretel,” Hansel spoke without speaking again. Gretel heard his voice come, but yet his mouth didn’t move.

She swallowed hard and nearly failed to swallow at all, her throat too dry and parched to make the motion. 

“Go home?” she asked, too afraid to even dare to hope that going home was possible.

It was just as well for Hansel’s next words would have made that hope falter. 

“Just go,” he said, lips still closed.

“I don’t understand,” she cried out. “Where would we go if not home?”

Hansel remained silent and Gretel’s misgivings increased. 

Her eyes flicked away from Hansel to the boat behind him. 

There was something unnatural in how the vessel sat unmoving on that flowing water with not so much as an anchor to keep it that way. There was something sinister about it sitting there all still, the dark wood of it on the grey water. The bird carved on the boat’s front looked angry, threatening, so realistic that it seemed possible to Gretel that it might come to life, turning from wood to flesh in order fly her way and attack her. 

Gretel licked her dry lips. “Would we go in the boat?”

“Yes,” immediately came Hansel’s voice again, “but there’s only room for one person, Gretel. We’ll have to take it one at a time.”

“But –“ Gretel’s voice cracked. “But if only one of us takes it, how will it get back for the other?”

Hansel was silent again. His eyes stared into Gretel without feeling. His face remained cadaverous and unreadable.

Gretel allowed herself to imagine Hansel’s suggestion for all of a moment, but a moment was enough to make her chest ache with revulsion. She didn’t know what would be worse: Hansel getting in that boat and leaving her to go to some unknown destination while she waited here by the water for God only knew how long, with no idea when or how or even if it might return, or getting in the boat by herself without knowing where it was headed, leaving Hansel behind to grow more ill from whatever was wrong with him. 

She didn’t even know how to swim if the boat sank which seemed possible considering how old it looked. Her father had always promised that he would take she and Hansel to the lake in Nachbarin someday and teach them, but it had never happened. 

Some aching part of Gretel thought now with despair that it never would. 

“I don’t want to,” she blurted without meaning to. Her breath caught in her throat once she realized what she’d done, but Hansel seemed entirely unmoved by her words. He said nothing. He did nothing. He didn’t frown or shake his head. He didn’t even blink. His lack of reaction only bolstered the sentiment Gretel felt, for all she had expressed it without deciding to. 

Some instinct in Gretel told her that getting on that boat was the wrong thing to do. Wherever it might take her, she already knew it wouldn’t be home.

“I don’t want to get on the boat,” Gretel repeated, entirely purposeful this time and more strongly than before. She added, in case that wasn’t enough, “I’m not  _ going _ to get on it.”

Hansel, already unmoving, somehow seemed to still even more. His body went tense for a long, long moment and then seemed to expand in a way that Gretel’s eyes couldn’t comprehend. He inhaled deeply and Gretel could hear his chest creaking with it as loudly as a door in an old house being opened. He exhaled slowly and the wind moved the leaves in the trees and pushed back a loose lock of Gretel’s hair. 

And then for just a second as Gretel looked at Hansel, she saw not the pale, strange thing her brother had become, but Hansel as he had always been. She saw Hansel with golden hair and golden skin. She saw him with eyes as brown as Gretel’s own, wet and with the sparkle back in them. She saw a smile on his face that looked as sad as Hansel had ever looked. 

She saw his mouth open as he spoke and heard his voice say quietly, “Goodbye, Gretel.”

And then Gretel blinked and the image was gone. 

The Hansel on the dock turned his slouched back to her, climbed into the little wooden boat, and sat down, all without the boat rocking at all or his movements making a sound. He folded his hands in his lap and then the boat jerked, just once, before it began moving up the water in a perfectly orderly fashion without Hansel having to row it or do anything to make it move.

Gretel watched in disbelief.

“Hansel?” she whispered, her eyes on her brother’s back as it got further and further away from her in a boat that moved by its own power.

Her heart jumped in her chest and suddenly Gretel was released from the invisible hands holding her where she was with force. She stumbled and a noise was ripped from her throat as she caught herself before falling down. She jerked her head up and saw that the boat was still moving. With urgency in her legs, Gretel ran to the water’s edge. 

Loudly, she yelled after the boat, “Hansel!” but Hansel seemed to not hear her for he didn’t so much as flinch at the sound of her voice. 

The boat just continued. It was getting further upstream, getting away from her. 

Panic gripped Gretel and without thinking about it, she started to run after the boat along the water’s edge. 

Her feet pounded the ground, aching, leaves crashing under them as she dodged around scraggly pines. The pain in Gretel’s stomach, previously plateaued, began to throb with new jolts of pain every time her feet touched the ground. Her breath was coming in short, gasping pants as she ran, and it made her feel lightheaded on every exhale.

Gretel ignored the pain and discomfort and ran for all she was worth, determined not to let Hansel get away. She thought for sure that she was running faster than the boat was sailing, that she would catch up, but no matter how hard she pushed herself forward, the boat seemed forever out of reach.

And then the water turned around a corner, putting the boat that Gretel was following like a beacon temporarily out of her vision. It was only a matter of seconds before Gretel turned herself, but by the time she did, it was too late.

The boat was already gone.

*

Gretel came to such an abrupt halt that she tripped over her own feet and went flying. 

Her body fell forward with force. Her arms automatically went out in front of her to catch her fall, but still she fell to the ground with a thud and a crunching of leaves beneath her. Her palms skinned themselves under her and her arms from her wrists down to her elbows jolted painfully as she landed. 

Gretel was almost ignorant to the pain. Her attention was too focused on the bend in the water, in that space that the boat with Hansel in it should have been, but which was empty, for the ache of her fall to register. 

It shouldn’t have been possible, but Gretel couldn’t disbelieve what her eyes were telling her. All she saw was the stretch of water with nothing on it and the thin trees that grew around it. The boat was nowhere in sight. Hansel was nowhere in sight. It was as though they had both simply vanished into thin air. 

She stared at that empty space for the span of a heartbeat. For two. Then a pain slammed into Gretel’s chest that was all raw emotion rather than physical sensation. Gretel let out a scream at it, short and shrill but  _ strong _ . She made a fist out of one of her outstretched hands and slammed it roughly down on the ground over and over again until the bottom of her fist went numb. 

Her fist raised to slam down again, but then it stopped. It hovered it the air a moment before it fell back to the ground without force, as weak as a puppet with its strings suddenly cut. 

Gretel took in a shuddering breath and held the taste of smoke in her throat. Her pain seemed to pause, held still in the center of her. Perplexion hit Gretel as she exhaled and she thought to herself: smoke?

She sniffed the air and caught it again. It wasn’t just her imagination. The smoke was there in her nostrils, sweet and faintly acrid underneath. 

Gretel pushed herself up to her knees with her scratched-up hands and looked around. It only took a turn of the head to the left, away from the bend in the river where Hansel disappeared, before Gretel saw it, and just as she had looked at the boat that sat so still by the dock not so long ago, here, too, Gretel stared in disbelief. 

The cabin sat only ten feet away from the water. It was a small building, smaller than even Gretel’s home in Verlassen, made of dirty planks of wood and an old straw roof that had clearly seen better days. The door was sloppily made with gaps at the top and bottom and slashed in the height of it. It was not even properly closed but cracked open a few inches, not enough for Gretel to look through from where she knelt but enough for some small animals to sneak in. The windows of the cabin, two in the front that Gretel saw, were in a similar state of disrepair. Those were so filthy it was impossible to see through them, even with holes in some places where the glass had been broken.

The whole place painted a poor image, indeed, and Gretel would have assumed it abandoned were it not for the chimney that grew from the roof where a grey trail of smoke rose out in a steady stream.

Someone was home or, at least, had been some time recently to have set a fire. 

Gretel, who had prayed that she was not alone in the forest such a short time before, now found herself choking down disquiet at the proof so close to her that there was someone in the Forest with her now. 

The reason for her disquiet was this: that cabin had not been there before. 

Gretel was sure of it. She had been focused on following Hansel in the boat, but she knew with all her being that she wouldn’t have overlooked something so out of place as a house in these woods no matter how focused she was on something else. Her eyes would have caught that building. They would have jerked away from the water, from Hansel, from the boat, to stare at it agog just as she was doing now, but they had not because the house hadn’t been there until suddenly it was.

Just as Hansel’s boat had somehow disappeared into thin air, this house had appeared just as inexplicably. 

And just as some deep instinct that resided in Gretel told her not to get on that boat, the same instinct was telling her now not to go in that house. 

But Gretel had listened to that instinct before and now Hansel was gone and somehow Gretel knew with a bone-deep certainty that he was gone for good. 

Perhaps if she had gotten on the boat, it would have taken her home after all or at least to wherever Hansel was going now. In hindsight, Gretel wondered if whatever place that was could truly be worse than the strange Forest she found herself trapped in. A part of her twinged with regret over not thinking it over more carefully before she told Hansel no, for not even trying to ask him more, for not pushing him to explain things to her, for not trying to insist that neither of them get on the boat or that maybe they could fit in it together. Neither Hansel or Gretel weighed much. Most other children weighed more than both of them combined, so surely they both could have gotten in the boat? Gretel scolded herself for not even bothering to try.

Maybe not getting on the boat was a mistake, then.

Maybe not going into the house would be a mistake, too.

Maybe there was someone in there who could help her after all. Someone who could tell her how to get back to Verlassen or even escort her there. 

Gretel’s mind was at war with her instincts, but she knew that the only way to find out for sure would be to go into the cabin and see for herself what was in there – or, rather,  _ who _ was in there. She knew that if she went in, there was a chance she might regret it but just as much Gretel knew that if she walked away and it turned out there was a kind person in there after all, she would regret that even more.

Gretel took a deep breath and pushed herself up from her kneeling position. She stood on heavy, shaking legs and began to walk slowly towards the cabin. Her every step was careful. Her breathing was kept purposefully quiet. It felt like it took a lifetime for Gretel to close the distance between where she fell and the cabin door, but before she knew it, she was there.

She raised a hand and brought it up towards the door. It hovered there over it, an inch of space between Gretel’s fingertips and the wood, before she gently closed that space, too. Her fingers landed. The wood of the door was rough like bark under her touch and it felt strangely warm like the skin above a pulse point. Gretel thought she even felt a light throbbing under her fingertips like a heartbeat, as well, but she brushed the thought away. She was probably feeling her own pulse reverberating from the veins in her wrist up to her fingers.

Gretel swallowed hard, second-guessing what she was about to do. The instinct in her telling her to just walk away was louder than ever, but Gretel forced herself to ignore it. She took another deep breath and with gentle force, pushed against the door. It swung slowly inward until Gretel heard the soft  _ knock _ of the inner doorknob hitting the inside wall.

Gretel stood on the threshold, peering in, but she could see nothing but shadowy shapes. No matter how she tried to make out what they were, all Gretel could see was darkness. If she wanted to know what was in the cabin, she would have to go in.

“God preserve me,” Gretel muttered under her breath, her eyes dashing back and forth into that darkness. “Mother Mary, full of grace, I promise if you keep me safe, I’ll never say a bad word about Wilhelm or Father Jacob or anyone ever again. If you can get me home, I’ll take my vows as soon as I’m eighteen and I’ll take flowers to every saint’s grave that I can before then.”

She inhaled sharply when she was done and, holding her breath, stepped into the cabin. She exhaled slowly and looked at her surroundings, her heart pounding as her eyes cast about the room. 

The interior of the cabin may have looked like nothing but darkness from the outside of the doorway, but standing within it, it was as well lit as if the walls were nothing but windows. This did it little good, however, for the inside was just as dirty as the exterior. It was only one large room. The floor was nothing but dirt with leaves strewn about here and there. The wooden walls looked rotten and cobweb-covered. The fireplace, which should have been lit for Gretel had seen smoke rising from the chimney, was full of nothing but grey ash and spiders. It looked like it hadn’t been used in years.

Gretel would have focused on that last part more than anything had other things about the interior not taken her by even more surprise. 

The animals on the high walls of the cabin were one of the surprises. Deer, all of them, with their heads mounted on plaques. Their mouths were agape, tongues lolling, eyes glassy and staring. They surrounded Gretel to the front, right, and left. There was barely an inch of space between them, the dead creatures so close that their antlers seemed to tangle together. 

But what was even more surprising was what sat in the center of the cabin. The only piece of furniture in the room was a table made of wood, glossy and clean unlike the wood of the cabin walls. It was intricately carved, made by some expert craftsman’s patient hands. It sat there, the one well taken care of thing in a place that was little more than a hovel. It was the kind of table a lord might have in his home, not something one would ever leave in a place such as this.

And on that table was the biggest surprise of all: meat. 

The entire table was laden with meat from one end to the other. All raw, uncooked flesh, in a variety of cuts. Gretel approached it tentatively and looked at the spread, at more meat than the butcher in Verlassen had ever had in his shop at one time, and even though none of it had ever seen a fire, her stomach still gurgled in hunger at the sight of it imagining what it might be like if it were cooked.

There were large red hunks like roasts and a pile of pink slices as thin as paper. There was chopped liver and kidney. There were some cuts that still had the skin attached, a pale white skin that Gretel thought had to belong to some kind of bird that had been plucked of its feathers. There was all that and more. None of it was on a plate or wrapped up. It was all sitting directly on the table, little pools of dark blood here and there leaking from it.

It was more meat than Gretel’s family had seen in years, more than Gretel had eaten in her lifetime, likely more than her father had ever hunted in his.

It was more than any sane person would ever leave just sitting out on a table in a derelict cabin in the middle of the woods – in  _ any _ woods, really, but in the Dark Forest it was even more suspect. 

Gretel’s instincts were bells tolling now, a choir of warning voices screaming in her head. She eyed the table’s bloody offerings with distrust and confusion. What was the purpose of it? Where had it all come from? Why was it here? And how had smoke been coming from the chimney when the fireplace hadn’t been used in a very long time? Why would so much meat be laid out in a place where no one had cooked anything in years? 

Gretel suspected some trick to it all, a trap. She was full of wariness, but she couldn’t ascertain what the trick she suspected might be.

Not until the voice spoke up from behind her. 

Her father’s voice, deep and kind, which asked her, “Aren’t you hungry, sweetheart?”

Gretel spun around, gasping, but she saw nothing but the empty doorway. The door was still pressed flush against the wall and all Gretel could see through the open space were the trees and leaf-covered ground of the Forest. 

There was no one there.

Gretel’s pulse was caught in the dimple at her throat. It was such a heavy feeling that Gretel felt like she might just throw her heart right up. 

“Father?” she called out tentatively. She swallowed thickly and nearly flinched when she felt a bead of sweat drip down the side of her neck. “Father…?”

“Aren’t you hungry, Gretel, dear?” her father’s voice came again. In front of Gretel. Above her. “Come, now. Eat up! Never know when your next meal might be.”

Gretel’s head felt as though there were a weight the size of a mountain on it, a weight made entirely of fear, but Gretel found strength enough to fight it. To raise her head in increments towards the sound of her father’s voice, her body shaking all the while. To look up. To look above the door.

To scream her throat raw at what she saw there.

There was a wooden plaque and on it, a mounted head. Its mouth agape. Its tongue lolling. Its eyes glossy and staring. 

Its face belonging to Gretel’s father. 

He smiled down at her, a horrifying facsimile of the gentle smile he had always had to spare her no matter how tough things were or how sad Gretel was. His tongue still stuck out. It seemed incapable of retracting. Drool dripped from off of it, a long line of spittle that extended past her sight-line and landed silently on the floor just inches away from Gretel’s feet

“I worked myself to the bone to get all this for you,” he somehow spoke around that tongue without it misshaping his words. “You can eat more now that Hansel’s gone. He doesn’t need food where he’s went.”

Gretel stared up at the head, wordless. Terror had stolen her voice from her. Dread kept her frozen in place.

The head twisted clockwise a fraction on its mount. Tilted in a way that on a normal person whose head was attached to their body might be called inquisitive. 

“Go ahead, Gretel,” gently encouraged her father’s voice. “Eat. I’ve always wanted to see you fed and now you can be. Don’t let me go to waste, alright?”

Me? 

Don’t let  **_me_ ** go to waste?

The meaning of the words hit Gretel an instant later. Bile rose in her throat in understanding and it was enough to break the spell over her. A cry like that of a kicked dog escaped her and she took off running out the cabin’s open doorway as fast as her already tired legs would take her.

“Gretel?” she heard her father’s voice calling out behind her. “Aren’t you hungry?”

Gretel ran faster. She was ignorant of what direction she was going except that it was  _ away _ . That was all that mattered to her, getting away. She ran until finally she couldn’t run anymore and she had to stop. She bent over, hands on her knees, gasping for breath, and she retched up nothing but air until she thought she could feel her throat ripping open with the force of it.

*

Gretel stayed like that for an indeterminable amount of time, bent over and breathing harshly. Her whole face burned. Her whole body ached madly. She felt nausea rolling over her like she were a patch of sand and the sickness was a wave constantly going in and out to tide, but because her stomach was empty there was nothing she could do by cough and heave. There was nothing in her that she could sick up but fear and she would not lose herself of that so easily.

Gretel kept trying not to think of the cabin, of the image of a table full of red meat and her father’s head mounted above the door like he was little more than a deer who someone had hunted and prepared like so much game. She tried to push it out of her head, to forget it, but the more Gretel tried not to think of it, the more present it was in her mind.

The Dark Forest was cursed. Gretel believed that now. She had no choice but to believe it. It seemed to her an age ago that she had asked Hansel how a forest could be evil, but Gretel had no need to ask such a question anymore. She now knew the answer well. 

The Forest she was in was as evil as anything. It had to be. There was no other way of describing it. Father Jacob gave sermons often about hell and what it would be like for the heretics that went there, but Gretel had never really understood what hell was until this. She had always thought the Father’s descriptions were fantastical and couldn’t comprehend what he was describing. It was too much for her understand before, but no longer.

“The devil will torment the heretics by turning their own minds against them,” Father Jacob would gleefully espouse during any given sermon. “The every horror of their mind will become their reality. The sins they have committed will be done unto them in tenfold. The betrayal they have committed against the Church and Our Father, God, will be visited on them in tenfold. Hell is not a lake of fire, my children, but a fire in the brain that lasts for an eternity and that no fever here on earth will ever compare to. The devil will torment them to madness and then he will feast on what he has made of them, bones and all! Pray you never have to face it, children! Pray with me that you will have the strength, always, to turn away from those here in this very village who would knowingly sin and would see you sin in turn.”

Gretel wasn’t a heretic, she didn’t think. She went to every sermon with her parents even when Hansel tried to get her to skip out with him and she paid attention most of the time. She had never committed any of the greater sins or, to her knowledge, even any of the lesser ones. She had done nothing to deserve going to hell and yet, that was surely where she was. 

And not just her, but Hansel and her father, too.

Gretel’s stomach clenched when she remembered her mother. She still didn’t know what had happened to her and she felt sick thinking that it might be something even worse than what had happened to father and Hansel. 

They had never gotten along, to be true, and Gretel had often wished that her mother would simply go away...but she had never meant it. She certainly had never meant it like this.

Gretel wondered if that was why she was in hell, because she’d wished her mother away. Maybe the devil had been listening and decided to giver her what she asked for and decided to take Hansel and her father, too, just to make her hurt. Father Jacob said the devil could do that, listen to peoples’ thoughts, and that he could make your thoughts real without even trying. He said people sinned more with the things they thought, without even thinking they were sinning, than they did by choosing to actively sin outside their own minds.

Was it a sin to dislike your mother? Gretel had always respected her mother the way Father Jacob said children were meant to respect their parents. She had always obeyed her. She had always jumped at her every command even when she didn’t want to. She had always done it all without question or comment. Did her mean thoughts weigh more than her actions? Did the sin of how she felt inside wipe away the good of her behavior? 

Guilt made Gretel feel sour in the heart. She prayed that her mother had, against all odds, made it out of the Dark Forest and somehow got back to their home in Verlassen. Gretel promised God and His mother that if she made it out of the Forest herself, she’d do better to learn how to love her mother the next time she saw her. Gretel prayed more than anything else that there would be a next time, that she would have the chance to fulfill that promise and the other promises she had made if only she could get out of the Forest alive.

Gretel straightened and her legs felt weak as the blood rushed back through them. She looked around at the empty woods before her and felt farther away from home than ever. Exhaustion consumed her, marrow-deep, but Gretel couldn’t allow herself to give up. She didn’t know what giving up would mean, but her mind flashed on Hansel, face white as death as he turned away from her for the last time. It flashed to her father, reduced to a table of meat and a mounted head.

No, she couldn’t allow herself to end up like them. She had to get out of the Dark Forest and if she couldn’t get out then she had to at least be able to tell herself that she had done her best to try.

“It’s time to go, then, Gretel,” she whispered to herself. She winced a second later when she realized Hansel had told her the same thing when he was trying to get her onto that boat. 

Gretel turned around and looked down, and then stilled when she saw not the trail of dirt spaces she had instinctively expected to see, but undisturbed leaf-covered ground instead. 

She bit at the inside of her cheek hard enough to sting. It was the only thing that stopped her from screaming in frustration. 

Gretel had forgotten all about the trail she was making when she took off after Hansel and the boat. It hadn’t even been a blip in her mind. She’d just been so focused on following Hansel, on not losing him – but she had lost him anyway and in the process, she had lost the trail, too. 

It was gone. 

Her way back was gone.

A sob rose up in Gretel’s throat but she pushed it down with violence.

“It’s fine,” she bit out, running a rough hand through her hair. She jerked it away viciously when her fingers got tangled in the strands, uncaring when the movement pulled at her hair and made her scalp sting painfully. 

That was fine, too. That was a simple sort of pain, the kind of pain she’d known since she was old enough to brush her own hair. She welcomed it more than the other pains she was feeling, especially the pain that didn’t have a physical cause. The pain that was all emotional, that came from wounds that would never close and sickness that could never be healed. 

Gretel reached her hand up again and pulled her hair on purpose. It hurt and at the same time, it quieted her other hurts. Gretel kept her hand wrapped around a few strands and pulled at it in short, intermittent jerks. That was even better. Gretel giggled loudly at the thought and the sound of shrill, girlish laughter in her own ears made her heartbeat jolt with panic. The giggle died as quickly as it started and Gretel felt like a part of her died with it.

She ignored the feeling, put it in the box with all the other things she was trying not to think of. She cleared her throat and muttered, “The stupid trail only led back to that clearing anyway. It didn’t lead home. You were lost before and you’re still lost now and one’s no better or worse than the other. It’s fine.  _ You’re _ fine.”

Saying it aloud didn’t make Gretel believe it. No matter how hard she pulled her hair.

“You’re  _ fine _ ,” she told herself again anyway. 

Gretel gave another glance at the woods. She took a deep breath. She let go of her hair and her hand flexed at her side where it dropped like it wanted to reach up on it’s own and not just pull at her hair, but rip it right out of her head. Gretel balled the hand in as tight a fist as she could manage and refrained from the impulse. 

“Forward is as good a direction as any, I guess,” she said just to hear the sound of her own voice one more time. 

Funny how it didn’t make Gretel feel any less alone.

*

The longer Gretel was in the Forest, the less aware she was of the passage of time. Her only indication that time hadn’t simply stopped the moment her family entered Dark Forest was that the sun had moved across the sky above her head since then. Were it not for that, Gretel wouldn’t have known how much time had passed, whether hours or minutes or days.

Gretel would walk for what seemed like a very long time until she was forced to stop, panting in exhaustion, so that she might rest against a tree and the spot she stopped at would look identical to where she last stopped to rest. She would try to find landmarks to track herself by – a tree with an odd pattern in the bark, a large rock on the ground, a scattering of pinecones that made a shape when she looked at them a certain way – and always Gretel would come across them again.

Gretel had tried making another trail on the ground to track her movements with by clearing spaces in the leaves with her feet. This lasted quite a bit, giving Gretel a modicum of hope that she was getting somewhere, until Gretel found herself approaching a cleared space on the ground that led into a trail of them and she knew that, just as before, she had been walking in circles again. 

It should have been an impossibility, reason argued. You couldn’t go in circles by walking in a straight line. 

But wasn’t the whole Forest an impossibility, then? Wasn’t what she saw of Hansel and her father impossible? What was walking in circles when you shouldn’t have been compared to that? 

If Gretel didn’t know better, she would think the Forest was playing with her, making things harder for her, giving her just enough hope for just long enough that she might truly believe escape was possible before taking it cruelly away. 

Gretel wasn’t so sure she did know better, either.

It was a mad thought. Father Jacob would call it a heretical, pagan sort of idea to ascribe sentience and thought, much less things like cunning and malice, to a forest. 

A forest didn’t have feelings or intelligence. It didn’t have the capability to make plans or carry them out. It wasn’t able to change its very landscape on a whim so that the person traversing it would become lost and confused. It wasn’t able to observe the people within its woods like a person might observe a deer it was hunting.

A forest didn’t, a forest wasn’t – and yet, something in Gretel told her that the Dark Forest did and was all those things.

Gretel felt like she was being watched with every step she took. She felt heard with her every gasping breath. Sometimes she felt that someone or something was so close behind her that she could feel its presence like the tip of a nose pressed to the back of her neck, but always when she spun around, there would be nothing there. Nothing but the trees, always a good distance away.

Those trees gave Gretel a sense of amusement. Not  _ her _ amusement, though, but theirs. Every time she turned around, a gasp escaping her, her eyes shifting this way and that only to see those skinny trunks, she had the feeling they were somehow laughing at her. She had the strangest premonition that they’d been creeping forward on silent roots, following her along. That one of them had brushed the skin of her neck with the fine tip of an outstretched pine needle, poking her the way a child might poke another to elicit surprise, and then suddenly they had all stopped and froze when she turned quickly to face them.

Gretel was afraid to turn her back to them, but there was nowhere in the Forest that she could stand where there would be no trees at her back. She was forced to swallow down her fear and turn around despite it, to continue walking because the only alternative was giving up. Gretel got the feeling the trees were amused by that, too. That they were amused by her helplessness.

And Gretel did feel helpless.

She felt hunted and toyed with. She felt weak. Her physical exhaustion and the fact that she hadn’t drank any water or had so much as a crumb of bread to eat in so long only made the feelings worse. Gretel’s tongue was as arid as the deserts in the east that she had only ever read about. Her lips were dry and cracked. Her hunger beat in her belly, a steady drum of longing, so great that she actually started to imagine that she could smell the scent of food over the woodsy smell of the Forest and the stink of her own sweat.

Fresh baked bread, melting butter, sugar that had been heated until it formed a dark brown syrup, cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger and all manner of other sweet spices. The scent of all of these together tickled at Gretel’s nose and then the scent grew as she continued to walk until the smell was so thick that Gretel could almost taste the rich saltiness of the butter on her tongue and feel her dry mouth watering at the pungency of the ginger. 

It was a delicious dream and a cruel one, but Gretel suddenly stopped short as she realized that it was no dream at all.

A house had appeared before her out of thin air just like that horrible cabin her father was in had appeared before, but this house was not so ugly as that. No,  _ this _ house...it really was something out of a dream, for the house in front of Gretel was made entirely of food. 

Instead of wooden walls, there was gingerbread. Instead of a hay or tin roof, there was flaky golden pastry. The windows were made of strips of red velvet cake bordering crystallized panes of sugar. The door was made of one giant slab of candy-cane and the knob was a large, glossy yellow butterscotch candy. 

Gretel, who had seen such horrors and such strangeness in the Dark Forest, found herself struck dumb at the sight before her – struck dumb and suddenly horribly aware of her hunger. Her stomach gurgled loudly and clenched with an ache that felt pit-deep. Her mouth was salivating at the thought of having a bite out of the house in front of her. Just  _ one _ bite would be enough. Just one bite would be more than she’d eaten in weeks.

Gretel took a stumbling step forward until sense prevailed and she stopped again. 

It was another trick, she thought with renewed despair. It would have to be another trick. 

Gretel thought that she had found water to drink, but she had only found the stream that took Hansel away from her. She thought she had found help, but she had only found her father in such terrible condition and that table full of horror that had been made of him. She had thought she was getting somewhere in the Forest a hundred times, but always she found herself right back where she started.

Gretel had thought that she had found herself some small bit of hope, some small saving grace, a thousand times over and yet every time it was a lie. Why would this house in front of her now be any different? What lie was it telling her? What horror did it hold behind its candy-coated door?

Gretel stared at the building, but she couldn’t parse what the trick might be. There was nothing visibly menacing about it. Nothing that suggested something terrible was waiting inside. Nothing strange about it at all except for the innate strangeness of a house made of baked goods and candy. 

Gretel’s stomach growled again, loudly. She bit her lip and could feel herself wavering.

Even if it  _ were  _ a trick, how bad could it really be? What could eating a little off of the house, just taking a nibble, do to her? What could be worse than the hunger she felt already, the gaping hole in her stomach where food should have been?

Gretel found herself taking a step forward without deciding to move. She stopped, hesitated, stared at the flaky pasty roof. Her stomach turned with want and that decided it for her. The next steps Gretel took were entirely purposeful. She crept forward tentatively, the scent of bread and sweetness growing the closer she got, until finally she stood just inches away from the house. 

Gretel inhaled deeply, savoring the smell. She thought for a moment that maybe all she would do was smell it, that that would be enough, that it would be as good as eating would be, but she knew the instant she tasted the cinnamon at the back of her throat that it wouldn’t be. That she would have to taste it for real.

Gretel reached up and put her hand to the house. She pressed down and felt the softness of freshly baked gingerbread, the warmth still radiating from it as though it were fresh from the oven. Carefully, she dug her fingers in, sinking them into the warm flesh of it, and tore off a small chunk. Slowly, Gretel brought the chunk to her mouth and took a small, little, bird-like bite. She tasted the gingerbread on her tongue, the texture of it, the warmth. 

It was the most delicious thing she’d ever had in her life.

Gretel took a larger bite, stuffing the rest of the chunk into her mouth. She chewed it with gusto, her mouth bursting with saliva at the sumptuous taste of the ginger and the warmth of it that seeped into her gums. Her stomach yearned for more before she could finish swallowing what she already had and heedless of her previous concern, Gretel didn’t hesitate. She used both hands to tear off an even larger chunk from the house and began eating it with the rapidity that only the truly starving could have.

Gretel ate, so consumed by the act of consuming that the rest of the Forest seemed to fade away around her. To finally be able to truly sate the hunger that she had carried for a lifetime was enough to make her forget her worries. It was enough to soothe the other physical aches in her body. It was even enough to blur the image of her father’s mounted head and that horrible table of meat that hanged over her mind like a cloud of smog.

Gretel was, for the first time since waking up in the Dark Forest, something close to content.

At least, she was until the candy-cane door suddenly flew open.

“Who’s out there eating my house?” croaked the imperious voice from the doorway. 

Gretel startled and took a step back in surprise, the piece of gingerbread she had been eating from dropping from her hands to the ground as she did.

The speaker of the demanding question turned out to be a woman and an old woman at that. She stood there in the space where the slab of candy-cane once was, a stooped figure with pure white hair pulled back into a harsh bun and her mouth pulled into an equally harsh expression. Her face was made up of coarse wrinkles and dry skin and her hands, the only other skin visible other than that on her face, were spotted with age, so translucently pale that Gretel could see the dark veins peering out from beneath the skin.

Time had not been kind to this old woman and her attire did her no favors, either. 

The dress she wore covered her from the top of her neck and went all the way down to past her feet, the extra material pooling on the ground where it was filthy with dirt. It might have been a good quality dress at one time, but as Gretel saw it now, it was hideous. Moth-worn patches of it had been chewed through and repaired badly with swatches of fabric that didn’t match each other in the slightest. It was frayed in multiple places and stained in others. It looked like it hadn’t been washed since the woman had first put it on.

Strangely, however, was the jewelry that the old woman wore with the dress.

While the dress itself was clearly ragged and dirty, the old woman also wore several pieces of jewelry with it that were anything but. At her neck, the woman had a necklace of real silver that shined in the evening sun with a row of blue jewels set in it that sparkled when she moved. At her wrists were two thick silver bracelets and on the ring finger on the woman’s left hand was a silver band. 

Gretel knew little about jewelry for her family didn’t own any. Her father had sold off his own wedding band years ago to buy a little bread and her mother’s had been lost at some point, so all Gretel had ever seen were worn by others around Verlassen – and Verlassen, being just a village where the most well-off could only make end’s meet and nothing more and not a great city full of rich nobles, had no one who wore much jewelry to begin with. 

Gretel knew  _ enough _ , however, to know that the jewelry the old woman wore must have been worth quite a bit. She didn’t know exactly how much, but certainly more than the dress the woman wore with it. 

The juxtaposition of them was therefore incredibly odd. The only reason Gretel didn’t find it even more so was because of all the much odder things she’d seen in the Dark Forest already.

“I know you’re there,” called the old woman in a haughty tone. Her brows furrowed as she continued to turn her head searching for the person she was talking to as though she couldn’t see Gretel standing there just a few feet away at all.

It was only then that Gretel finally realized that the woman  _ couldn’t _ see her. She had been so focused on the woman’s attire that she hadn’t noticed something else: that her eyes were milky white, sightless. 

Pity pooled in Gretel’s full belly and a surge of discomfort washed through her chest, the sort of discomfort the likes of which any young girl might feel when looking at an old woman who wore that age badly and knowing that she was once young herself.

How terrible it must have been to not be able to see? How frightening, especially in such a place as this?

Perhaps it was that pity that had Gretel letting her guard down when she knew what a place the Forest was. Perhaps it was that which had her speaking up when the old woman called out again, demanding that whoever had been eating her house answer her. 

“It was me, lady,” Gretel said, swallowing nervously when the old woman’s blind eyes instantly swung around to look at her as if they could actually see. “I’m sorry for eating your house! I was just so hungry, you see? I’ve been lost for so long. I didn’t think anyone lived here.”

“Hmmph!” The old woman’s head reared back. She demanded, “Why wouldn’t someone live here? Where have you been that there is such a surplus of dwellings and such a dearth of people to fill them?”

Gretel’s mind went to the cabin and her father. Her mouth went dry and she found herself unable to say anything about that bad place aloud. She prayed the old woman wouldn’t push her to.

For the first time since entering the Dark Forest, Gretel’s prayer was answered.

“You sound young, girl,” the old woman said suddenly, her brows furrowing. “Are you young? Are you a little child?”

“I’m ten,” Gretel said awkwardly. She knew she was young compared to the woman, but she still didn’t quite like being called a ‘little child’.

“Ten!” the old woman crowed. If she noticed the awkwardness of Gretel’s answer, she showed no sign of it. Rather, her demeanor brightened considerably. Her brows shot up and her lips curled in a pleased little smile that exacerbated the wrinkles on her face and revealed a row of grey teeth. She stood much straighter, too, her back making an audible crack as it rightened from its previous stooped form. 

“ _ Ten _ !” the old woman repeated. She sounded somehow both wonderfully pleased and horribly sour at the same time. “Such youth you have! Such wonderful, delicious youth! I’m sure you’re just full of energy, aren’t you?”

Gretel hesitated, some of her wariness returning. The old woman didn’t look like much of a threat, really, but so far nothing Gretel had found in the Forest had been friendly to her. Even Hansel and her father had contributed to her torment, to say nothing of the terrain of the Forest itself. Gretel had thought the gingerbread house might have some horror hidden inside before the door opened, but could the old woman really be that horror?

More importantly, could Gretel afford to turn her back on the old woman if she wasn’t? If she was just the old woman she seemed to be and she could provide some help, no matter how small, to Gretel who was in dire need of assistance of any kind?

“Actually,” Gretel said slowly, “I’m very tired, lady. I’ve been lost in the Forest for a very long time, as I said before. I haven’t had any rest or food or drink. I keep trying to get out so that I can go home, but I can’t find my way. It’s like...like the Forest has me going around and around in circles.” 

“The Forest?” The old woman grimaced. “Filthy places, forests. It’s much more civilized to live in a city, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’ve lived in a village my whole life. I’ve never been to a city before.”

“Oh? How terrible for you.”

Gretel didn’t think it was terrible at all, but she had no wish to offend the woman by saying so. Instead she said, “I’m from Verlassen, lady. Do you know it?”

“ _ Verlassen _ ?” the old woman repeated, the surprise blatant in her voice. She blinked several times very quickly. “Know it, girl? I used to live there!”

It was Gretel’s turn to be surprised then. 

“You did?” she asked, not quite able to keep the disbelief from her voice. 

Her disbelief wasn’t without reason. 

Gretel had lived in Verlassen her whole life and knew everyone else who lived in the village, too. She knew also, then, that no one had moved out of the village in her ten years of memory. The last time someone did move, a baker’s daughter who married a smith from Flechse decades before Gretel was born, was still a subject of gossip that carried a tinge of surprise with it when people discussed the fact that the girl had left. 

People who were born in Verlassen typically stayed there forever. Even after dying, they were buried in the village’s cemetery. The few times someone left were memorable and were talked about for years afterwards. If this woman had once lived in Gretel’s village and left, Gretel would know even if it happened a very long time ago.

Still, Gretel found herself observing the old woman more closely despite her disbelief. She searched for some sign of familiarity in that wrinkled face and thought, perhaps, that she felt the stirrings of recognition after all. 

Something about the shape of the woman’s face, her nose, even her mouth seemed spark at a memory in Gretel or, at least, an echo of a memory. Gretel thought she might have seen the old woman before, perhaps when she was younger and age hadn’t yet worn over her looks, or perhaps she had seen someone who was the old woman’s kin. 

But the thought was just a niggle in Gretel’s head. She couldn’t put a name to whoever the woman reminded her of or a face other than the one in front of her. 

“I did live in Verlassen,” the old woman said, “for much longer than I ever cared to. My husband’s family’s village. We met when we were both staying in Zeitlich for a time and moved to Verlassen shortly after we married. He thought village life would be better for raising a family than life in a city and I was young enough and loved him enough to allow him to get his way. Ha!” 

The old woman laughed once, loud and bitter, and Gretel flinched at the sound. 

There was something oddly, uncomfortably familiar about it, too. 

“That was the worst mistake I ever made,” the woman continued. “We would have been so much happier if we’d moved to Wohlstand where my grandmother lived, the way I wanted us to do. She would have seen that we were taken care of and that my husband had a job that kept us well in life, but my husband had his  _ pride _ . He was much too proud to let an old woman pay his way. Of course, he didn’t say it like that. He said either he would provide for his family himself or no one would. That that was the way real men lived their lives and it would be shameful to do otherwise. Well, no one  _ did _ provide for us in poor, little Verlassen. Such a foolish sentiment he had. So proud of his manhood and thinking the fact that he was a man was enough for him to get by on. Tell me, girl, can you eat pride?”

“...No, lady,” Gretel answered quietly, for lack of anything else to say. 

“Will pride put meat and bread on the table?”

“No, lady.”

“ _ No _ ,” the old woman spat, the word landing like a tome on a floor, heavy and weighed down with finality, “of course not.”

Gretel didn’t know how to reply. She felt distinctly ill at ease, but couldn’t put into words why. The old woman had done nothing to harm her, to even threaten her, but how she spoke – and the things she spoke of – made Gretel feel as uncomfortable as the sight of Hansel’s pale, waxen skin had when she first saw it. It made the food she had eaten settle like a bundle of stones in her belly, unpleasantly heavy and hard.

But before Gretel could decipher her feelings or decide what to do about them, the old woman spoke again.

“You said you were ten, didn’t you, girl?” she asked Gretel suddenly, and before Gretel could answer, went on, sounding somehow both wistful and bitter at the same time, “I remember being ten. It was a good age. Old enough to know you’re intelligent and to relish in it, but young enough that you don’t yet know that no one will ever care how smart you are so long as you’re not a man. Are you smart, girl?”

Gretel hesitated. “I think so, lady.”

“Hmmph. You’re happy, too, I suppose? A happy little ten year old without a care in the world?”

“I try to be,” Gretel said, as honest an answer as she could give. 

Truthfully, she wasn’t very happy at the moment and had more cares than she’d like, but her mother had taught her that when adults asked children how they were, they never wanted to hear the truth. Her mother hadn’t put it that way, exactly, but that’s what Gretel had learned nonetheless. 

“They ask,” her mother had told her sternly, “because they want to remember how nice their childhood was by hearing about how nice your childhood is. They don’t want you to burden them with all your little foibles. For a child to whine about their small, childish problems when they have real problems to deal with...oh, there is no greater disrespect!”

The last thing Gretel wanted to do was disrespect the old woman. She had already heard enough of the woman’s acid tongue to know that she was better off without giving her a reason to turn it on her directly.

“What I wouldn’t give,” the old woman was saying, “to go back to being but ten again. What I wouldn’t give to taste it!” 

Her expression shuttered as her unseeing eyes seemed to stare Gretel down to her very marrow. After a long, uncomfortable moment of silence where Gretel didn’t know what to say and the old woman didn’t seem inclined to speak, the old woman finally broke the silence.

“You come in, then, girl,” she said. “I have a chore or two that need doing that you can help me with and I’ll give you a glass of water in return.”

Gretel tried to swallow, but her throat was too dry to do more than make a failed attempt at a gulp. A simple glass of water sounded as good to Gretel then as a feast would have sounded to her only days ago, and yet she was wary at the thought of going into the old woman’s gingerbread house.

She hadn’t hurt Gretel. She hadn’t even been mean to her. But no matter that the old woman hadn’t treated Gretel poorly, she hadn’t treated her in the way Gretel was used to adults treating her, either. That little voice inside of Gretel that had warned her not to get in the boat with Hansel or to go into the cabin where she found her father before now told her not to go into the gingerbread house, but Gretel didn’t know if that voice could be trusted anymore than the old woman could.

She’d listened to it once and lost Hansel because of it. She might’ve been on her way home or, at least, to some other village even now if she’d only gotten in that boat as Hansel had asked.

“Girl?” the old woman called, as if Gretel might have disappeared without saying a word to her about it. 

She was only a blind woman, Gretel thought, and an old one at that. What danger could there be?

And Gretel was so thirsty, after all. A person could only survive for so long without water, that’s what her father had said.

“I’m here, lady,” Gretel answered back. She took a hesitant step forward and then another. “I suppose I can do a few chores for you, if I might have some water.”

The old woman smiled, slow and close-lipped. 

“Of course, girl,” she said, her tone light, “you can have that. Come right in.”

And so Gretel did.

*

Gretel expected that the inside of the gingerbread house would be the same as the outside. She pictured a table made of crackers and a bed made of marshmallow, muffin chairs and a rug of spun sugar. 

The inside of the house, however, was nothing like the outside. The inside was just a normal house made of the normal things most houses were made of. 

There were normal walls and a normal rug on the floor on the inside of the door and a normal wooden table in the center of the main room with a normal pitcher on its surface and one normal wooden chair in front of it. There were normal cabinets and normal floorboards and a normal bed off in one corner which was covered in perfectly normal sheets.

The most abnormal thing in the room that Gretel could see was the oven which was more strange for its dimensions, rather than its building material. 

It was the largest oven Gretel had ever seen. She was sure, in fact, that it was likely the largest oven that existed in all of the world. The thing had the shape of a horseshoe with giant red bricks neatly placed along its inverted ‘U’ and a line of them along its bottom. It took up almost the entire wall it rested upon and had a large wooden door with a small window in its center which, oddly, had metal bars in front of it. The door was currently open and the fire inside the oven was bright and roaring. 

The heat of it was so great that it hit Gretel like a physical push as she crossed over the house’s threshold, but the old woman seemed unaffected by it. She bustled into the house and went straight to a cabinet where she removed a single glass. She then walked to the table and poured some water into the glass without spilling a drop. Once the glass was full, she held it out in Gretel’s general direction. 

“Here, girl,” the old woman said loudly, almost eagerly. “Take it!”

Gretel jumped at the woman’s tone, but rushed forward to take the glass of water quickly from her hand. In her haste some of the water spilled over, across Gretel’s skin and onto the floor, but the old woman didn’t notice. She was only staring, as much as a blind woman could, at Gretel as if waiting for something.

“Well?” the old woman asked impatiently. “Are you drinking it or not?”

“...Yes, lady,” Gretel said slowly. 

She looked at the glass of water, something uncomfortable slithering through her stomach at the innocuous sight of it, but her throat was parched enough that she felt like she’d drink even filthy water from a puddle on the ground if it was the only thing in front of her. 

Gretel raised the glass to her mouth and took a small, tentative sip, and thankfully that was enough to wash away the dryness in her throat and mouth. The water was refreshing, but bitter, and Gretel had little desire to drink any more than she needed to in order to quench her thirst.

“It’s very good, lady,” Gretel lied as she put the glass of water down on the table as quietly as she could, hoping the woman wouldn’t hear it. “Thank you.”

“I didn’t do it out of kindness, girl. You said you’d help me with a chore or two, did you not?”

“Yes, lady, I did,” Gretel said. She looked around the one room house and wondered what possible chores there were to do, but could see nothing obvious. The bed was made, the floor was swept, everything was clean. “What is it you need done?”

The old woman inclined her head stiffly in the direction of that great oven. “I put a pot of stew in there earlier. It should be done by now, so I’d like you to get it out.”

Gretel slowly turned he head back to the oven and she felt something within her falter as she looked at the large, open space in front of it. All Gretel could see within that doorway was the fire blazing. She saw no pot and if there was one in there, she could see no way she might take it out without walking into the flames to do so, and Gretel knew that wasn’t anything that anyone could survive.

“Well, girl?” the old woman demanded.

“I –“ Gretel stopped, unsure. She stared at the old woman’s face, hoping to find some clue in it, some sign, though of what, she didn’t know. All she saw in the woman’s face was impatience. “I’m sorry, lady. I’m not sure how.”

“Not sure  _ how _ ?” the old woman scoffed. “It isn’t difficult, girl. Here –“ 

The woman moved towards the oven and stopped by its open door. She stared sightlessly in the direction Gretel was in, impatient and waiting. 

Gretel hesitated, but slowly made her way to the oven until she stood near the woman. The heat was even more overpowering there, so strong that it made Gretel’s eyes burn and the skin on her face feel uncomfortably hot. She thought that if she stood there for very long, she would surely redden and be in as much pain as any sunburn had ever given her.

“All you have to do,” the old woman said slowly, as if she were explaining something very simple to some _ one _ very simple, “is reach in and get the pot for me.”

Gretel looked into the bright light of the fire, but had to look away again quickly. It was painfully luminous and all she could see within those flames was an orange glow so alive that it became white after just a few seconds. She still saw that white even with her eyes off of the fire when she blinked and everything she saw with her eyes opened looked faded out, the colors gone strange the same as they would had she stared into the sun.

The glance Gretel had confirmed one thing for her, however: 

“I don’t see the pot, lady.”

“You don’t need to see it,” the old woman insisted. “It’s just there in the center. All you need to do is reach in and get it.”

Gretel glanced at the fire again despite herself, then ripped her gaze away. Fear rose in her at the thought of reaching into that inferno. She shook her head rapidly, despite the fact that the woman couldn’t see her do it. “I’ll be burned, I can’t.”

“The handle won’t burn you, girl. Just reach in and grasp it, it won’t take but a second.”

“But the fire will! I can’t!”

“You promised to do me a chore,” the old woman argued. “Did you lie to me when you said that? Lie to me just to get into my home after you had the audacity to eat it, girl? Is that what you are, Gretel? A liar? A filthy little liar, is that it?”

“I’ll do whatever chore you want!” Gretel insisted, begged. “But I can’t do that, lady. Please, I –“

Gretel stopped, her tongue going dry for reasons that had nothing to do with thirst. She replayed the woman’s words back in her head and suddenly felt a cold chill run through her, despite the heat.

“How do you know my name?” she asked, her voice horribly small.

“ _ What _ ?” the old woman snapped. “What has your name to do with anything? You told me, of course. Now, I told you to reach into the oven, so do it!”

“I  _ never _ told you my name,” Gretel insisted, and she knew it to be true. 

She took a step back, away from the old woman and the oven both -- or, at least, she tried to, but faster than Gretel thought possible, the old woman reached out, striking like a snake, and grabbed her by the arm. Her grip was bruising, as strong as that of a man, and expression on the woman’s face was hideous with anger. 

“You  _ get into the oven _ , Gretel!” the old woman snarled, viciously shaking Gretel’s arm with such force that it sent a sharp pain from Gretel’s elbow all the way up to her collarbone. “You  _ get into it now _ , you ungrateful little girl!”

“No!” Gretel screamed and tried desperately to wrench her arm from out of that terrible grip to no avail. 

She and the old woman struggled, both of them stumbling and skittering across the floor in the fight as Gretel tried to get away and the old woman tried to drag her closer to the oven – tried to drag her  _ into _ it, Gretel realized with nauseating terror that only made her desperation to get free grow. 

Every time Gretel managed to get back, it seemed the old woman would only drag her forward again. It was a sick game of tug of war and Gretel felt like nothing more than a rope held between the snarling, rabid mouths of two greedy dogs. She was weakening rapidly, her time in the Forest and her lifetime of malnutrition both combining to make her ill-suited to lasting long in such a battle, but meanwhile the old woman seemed to posses an unlimited strength.

Gretel knew she couldn’t stop fighting, but her struggles grew weaker regardless. Every time the old woman jerked her in her direction, she seemed to be closer to the oven than ever before, and every time Gretel jerked away, the distance she was able to escape to seemed less and less. Gretel was terrified that this was a battle she would lose, that her body would give out on her at any second, that the old woman would gain the one moment she needed to throw Gretel into the oven and she would be lost in those flames, burning alive.

“Why are you doing this!” Gretel screamed, her voice a shrill cry that it hurt her to make.

“I fed my children for years,” the old woman snarled, the sound of it more animal than human, “it’s only fair that you feed me, Gretel!” 

Gretel cried out as the old woman dragged her closer to the oven than ever, so close that Gretel swore she could smell her hair burning from being caught on the lick of a flame. Pure, primal desperation seized her, and when Gretel jerked her arm back again, she used what seemed like the last of her strength to do it. The pull brought not only Gretel’s own arm, but also the old woman’s hand that still gripped it so tightly within scant inches of Gretel’s mouth, and without thinking about it, Gretel lashed out with her teeth and latched on to that wrinkled hand and bit down for all she was worth until she tasted the copper twang of blood on her lips.

The old woman made a startled yelp and released Gretel at last with such a force that Gretel stumbled back and nearly fell on her bottom. She managed to remain standing by fluke alone and only caught a snapshot of the old woman’s hand, bleeding and held close to her face, and the old woman’s sightless eyes glued to them as though they could really see and were shocked by what they took in.

Gretel didn’t savor the image. She didn’t take the time to register it. Her body acted on automatic, on instinct, and she did what instinct told her to do. She rushed forward with a loud cry and with all the force she still had in her, she ran at the old woman and gave her a great push. The old woman barely had time to yell in surprise again before she was stumbling back, tripping, and going head first right into the oven where her horrible screams still weren’t loud enough to muffle the sound of sizzling flesh.

Gretel stared into the fire, shocked by her own actions, and horrified by the sight of a human shaped form within those flames, on fire itself and running around. The form ran without purpose or direction, but when it got close to the open doorway, panic shot through Gretel and she rushed to close the door. The heavy wood of it was nearly too much for Gretel to move, but her fear drove her to it. She got the door shut and latched just in time. 

The old woman slammed against the door, her face pressed right up to the bars. Her skin was turning the color and consistency of raw pork, greasy with leaking fat, wet with blood and open sores. Her hair was charred black in places and on fire in others. The old woman’s white eyes turned this way and that, and her nose was pressed between the bars, sniffing loudly, as though she were trying to smell Gretel out.

“Let me out, Gretel,” the old woman begged sweetly, her voice softer than it ever was even as she burned. She grinned, her grey teeth gleaming with obscene wetness. “Come now, little girl. Be good and let me out.”

Gretel made a strangled noise and backed away until her bottom hit the wooden edge of the table and she startled so badly that she nearly fell again.

“Aren’t you hungry, Gretel?” the old woman singsonged and Gretel was sickened at hearing those words again, ill at all they implied. “Open the door, Gretel, and come in with me. We’ll eat together, if that’s what you want. Just open the door, girl. Open it and we’ll fill your belly right up.”

Bile rose up Gretel’s throat and she gagged trying to keep it down.

“Gretel!” the old woman screeched, her face beginning to melt down the bars and revealing the pink and white underneath. “Do what I say, Gretel! You let me out of here  _ now! _ Let me out, Gretel! Let me out, let me out, let me ---”

“ _ No! _ ” Gretel finally screamed. Her hands went up to slam against her ears, blocking out the sound. 

“ _ No _ !” she screamed again and went running out of the gingerbread house as fast as her shaking legs would take her. 

*

At some point, Gretel’s running turned to walking.

At some point, her walking turned to stumbling.

At some point, her stumbling stopped and Gretel collapsed on the ground, her aching legs folding beneath her.

Gretel’s face was sore the way it had been two summers ago when she had fallen asleep outside with Hansel and the both of them had gotten horribly sunburned all over. Her whole body was in pain and felt hot and flush from head to toe. Her stomach was cramped and she was so nauseous she was dizzy with it. The smell of cooking flesh and burning hair was thick in her nostrils, and Gretel found herself breathing through her mouth so as not to smell it. 

Despite the pain in her body, Gretel’s mind was numb. Empty. The last horror she had been through had scoured something from it, something vital. That moment she had broken down crying after losing Hansel seemed so long ago. Now, crying was beyond her. A part of her knew she should cry and a part of her wanted to, but Gretel simply couldn’t. 

She wondered if she was dead. 

She felt dead. She knew that she was breathing and that her heart beat slowly in her chest, but they seemed poor standards to measure life by. Gretel felt dead in every way that mattered. She felt like she was dead as surely as her father was dead with his head mounted on that wall, no matter that he could still talk. She felt like she was as dead as Hansel must have been and understood then why he had acted so strangely if this was how he felt. If her mother was still alive out there somewhere, if she managed to escape, to somehow make it home, that possibility seemed so scant and impossible now that Gretel could hardly credit it.

Gretel felt like she had died in this Forest, that she had been dealt one mortal blow after another and her life blood had leaked out onto the leaf strewn ground, hungrily sucked up before she could even tell that it was gone. 

She could tell now, however. 

She was dead. It was only that her body didn’t seem to know it yet.

Above Gretel, high in the trees, branches shifted and creaked. A breeze snaked slowly through the leaves, making them skitter together as they moved against one another in a soft noise that sounded like whispers. The breeze blew down and brushed along Gretel’s face, making the sunburn ache of her skin sting for a long, vicious moment that had Gretel wincing and blinking back tears that wet her eyes unbidden. Gretel brought her fists up to wipe the tears away and when she moved her hands back down to her lap, that was when she saw the light.

Off in the distance, somewhere past the trees in front of her, a light so small it was barely more than that of a star’s light in the night sky, but the late evening cast of the Forest made it easy to spot. 

A light that might belong to a lantern or a candle or a torch, but some sign of life – of a person or a place – regardless.

Gretel stared at it for a long moment and then she laughed almost angrily.

“I won’t go,” she said softly, her small and quiet voice as loud as a house crashing down in the silent Forest. “It’s a trick, I---”

Gretel stopped suddenly and bit viciously down on her tongue. 

Above her, the trees shifted again. The branches snickered. The leaves sounded like they were laughing, the sort of laughter a person might make with their whole body shaking and their hands held up to cover their mouth. The sun wasn’t visible in the sky now, but there was a little blue cast light still left. It was late evening, then. If Gretel were home and there was food to eat, then it would be dinner time, but of course, Gretel wasn’t home and there would be no food to eat even if she was.

It would be night soon and there was no moon due tonight. If Gretel stayed where she was, soon the darkness would surround her. She wouldn’t be able to see her own hands in front of her. She wouldn’t be able to see the trees that surrounded her. She wouldn’t be able to see them if they moved.

The leaves above her rustled again. They sounded excited. They sounded impatient. They sounded as if they might all fall at any moment with a fury and entrap Gretel within the eye of their tornado, swallowing her whole.

“I won’t go,” Gretel said again, but even as the words came out her stomach was already sinking with the weight of inevitability and she found herself struggling to stand. It took an effort, but she managed to stumble to her feet. 

“It’s a trick,” Gretel said again, but already she was walking towards the light.

*

Gretel staggered towards the light, her gait slow and limping. She didn’t know what moved her, but she knew it wasn’t hope. Gretel was entirely numb inside, all hope of escaping the Forest drained away as thoroughly as if her every patch of skin had been covered in leeches and they had sucked the hope out of her down to the very last drop. She knew not what the light she was heading towards was, but in her heart of hearts she knew it would be nothing good.

And yet, Gretel still continued forward. 

The only alternative was to sit and wait for darkness and to pray that she would see the sun again. Moving towards the light was the better option. The only option. It at least gave Gretel the illusion that she was doing something, anything, other than giving up, and even now – even with as dead as she felt inside – something inside of Gretel refused to let her quit.

She moved towards the light, slowly but steadily, and the light grew in gradual increments as she headed towards it. The Forest was deathly silent around her, her breaths were as loud as hurricaneous winds, and the leaves crashed under her feet in a clamor of noise – and the light grew from the speck of a single star in the night’s vast sky to something more. It gained color, a pale orange, first, and then it began to gain shape. 

And then it gained provenance.

Gretel came to a sudden stop next to a large pine and stared out at the source of the light. 

A house sat perhaps twenty feet away from where Gretel stood. It was a building with white stone walls and a simple tiled roof that was placed on a patch of grassy ground. A chimney grew from the roof, but no smoke rose from it. The house was small and old, but clearly well taken care of. On the roof were patches in places that someone had taken pains to properly repair, the walls were free of mold and other filth, and there were mums of orange and red along with the pale green stalks of peppermint growing around its sides, giving it a splash of life that was muted – but not dimmed entirely – by the late evening light.

The house was also entirely familiar to Gretel, because this house was  _ her _ house. It was the house she had been born in and that she had lived in all her life with her brother and her mother and her father. Gretel thought that she could live to be a hundred and travel all around the world, see all the places there were to see, and always she would recognize this place above all others.

The light came from the back window. It was open and a lantern sat innocuously on the sill, its lonesome flame like a guiding light left there to lead Gretel home.

Sudden, fierce longing slammed painfully into Gretel’s throat and she let out an anguished sound. Her feet were lurching forward before she knew it and when she realized she was moving, she stopped and froze, her body going tense.

Was this just another trick? Would this house –  _ her _ house, her  _ home _ – be like that ramshackle cabin in the woods? Would it be like the gingerbread house? Was there some monstrous tableau just waiting for Gretel at the table she and her family had eaten at on the rare days they had food enough to call it a meal? Would there be some horror waiting for her in the bed she’d shared with her brother? Would she open the back door and find something more terrible than what Hansel had become or her father? Would she find another creature like that old woman who had seemed non-threatening enough at first until she’d tried to roast Gretel alive?

Was this just another trick the Forest was playing on her? 

Gretel could almost believe it – and a wary, tired part of her certainly did – except that…

Gretel darted her eyes around her. Slowly, she turned her head to look over her shoulder and then just as slowly looked back as if to verify the full picture of it. 

In front of her, she saw her house, her back yard, and the lantern in the window sill. To either of her sides, she saw the familiar land that bordered her home; a little up the way she could make out the outline of her nearest neighbor’s house and the grey smoke that rose from their chimney, barely visible in the darkening light. 

And behind Gretel? Behind her was the tree line of the Forest. The tree line that she’d seen every time she ever went outside. The tree line that she’d never crossed except that morning when her parents had brought up the idea of going on a walk and Hansel had been so excited that Gretel had agreed to go just to please him – and regretted it now, completely.

That morning seemed a lifetime ago already. The fact that it had only been mere hours, not even a whole day, was as strikingly strange as anything Gretel had seen in the Forest had been.

But now, inexplicably, she was out of the Forest. 

She was  _ out _ of the Forest. 

She was out of the Forest and there was a light on in the window, a light that someone had to have put there, and the only person who Gretel could think of was – 

“Mother?” Gretel whispered, her voice as light as a breeze. Hope savagely renewed itself in Gretel’s chest and a sound like a sob escaped her. Louder, Gretel yelled, “Mother!” and she started running towards her home as fast as her spent legs could take her. 

Gretel reached the back door faster than seemed possible, the distance closing in a blink. Her hand was shaking as she put it to the doorknob and she barely had the strength to turn it, but she did. She pushed the door open and it creaked loudly as it slid inward, but Gretel paid no heed to the sound. She was going into her home, the place that she thought she’d never see again, and the first breath she took of the familiar smell of the place was suddenly better to her than any feast, any treasure, any breath of air she’d ever taken could ever be.

“Mother!” Gretel called as she ran through the door. “Mother!”

But Gretel stopped short as she cast her eyes around the room and saw no one there. 

The lantern burning in the window sill gave enough light that Gretel could clearly see the table and the four chairs surrounding it, empty of any person or any sign of difference from when they’d all left that morning that would show that a person had been there since. 

Gretel was not immediately deterred, however. She made an impatient sound and took the lantern from the window sill, holding it carefully as she quickly made her way through the rest of the house.

“Mother!” she yelled as she ran into her parents’ bedroom, faltering when she saw nothing but a neatly made bed and no one in it.

“Mother!” she called as she ran to her and Hansel’s room next and likewise saw no one and nothing, the bed the same as it was that morning when she and Hansel had gotten out of it. 

“Mother?” she said softly as she pushed open the door to the privy room and found it empty of anything but the pot which was empty itself, as it had been that morning when Gretel had dumped it as it was her chore to do. 

Gretel wavered then, unsure of what to do. Theirs was not a large house and there were no other rooms in it, no other place her mother might be. There was no sign that her mother had returned to the house at all that Gretel could see, either, other than the lantern – but who could have lit it if not her? Who would have?

Perhaps her mother had come home and lit the lantern before going somewhere else? Perhaps she’d gone to get help, to a physician if she were hurt or sick or to tell the constable what had happened so that he might send people to look for Gretel, Hansel, and their father? In that case, perhaps she would come back home soon – she would have to, wouldn’t she? Perhaps Gretel had just missed her?

Gretel inhaled shakily and made her way back to the table. She put the lantern down on it and crossed the room to take her coat off the hook by the door. It hadn’t been cold enough to warrant wearing that morning, but now it was getting a bit chill, and so Gretel wrapped the coat around her and relished in the added weight and warmth of it around her. She ignored the lonely sight of Hansel’s coat, as well as her mother’s and father’s still hanging there. She ignored what it might mean that her mother’s coat was still there at all. 

She pulled out a chair at the table, the same chair she always took when she sat down, and she sat now, scooting herself in so that she could cross her arms at the table comfortably. 

She would wait for her mother to come home, that was all there was for it. There was nothing else she could do. She would just sit there and wait and surely –  _ surely _ – her mother would come back eventually. She would have to. Someone had lit that lantern and it had to have been her mother. Gretel clung to these hopes the way a drowning sailor might cling to a raft. She clung to them fiercely, as though her very life depended on her refusing to let them go.

But as the minutes whiled down, Gretel’s mother never came. The door didn’t suddenly fly open or even creak open softly. No one knocked to tell Gretel that her mother was fine and at someone else’s house, desperately waiting to hear if any of her family had made it home. No physician, no constable, no neighbor, and not Gretel’s mother herself. 

Gretel promised herself that she would stay awake until morning, so that she would be there to see her mother whenever she came in, no matter how late it was, but her time in the Forest had drained her of her energy. She was exhausted, physically and mentally. No matter how much she willed herself to remain awake, the ability was well beyond her.

Eventually, Gretel drifted off into sleep with her head pressed to her folded arms on the tabletop and the lantern burning close by. She would not wake up even when the lantern burned out or when the sun came up in the morning. Only at mid-day would Gretel wake, tired as if she’d never slept at all. She would search her house again and again, she would find no sign of her mother, and when she wandered out of her house, still clinging to her hope, she would find that no one in Verlassen had seen her mother since the morning before, either, and none of them knew who had lit the lantern in her windowsill if not her mother.

Gretel’s hope would be vanquished at last. 

She would never see her mother again and it would be years before she realized why.

*

To the north of the village Verlassen and at the south of the village Nachbarin, there is a stretch of woodland known to the villagers as The Dark Forest. The Dark Forest, which is actually quite sunny in most places, is considered a cursed place by anyone who lives nearby. It is thought of as an evil, godless stretch of land that has a heart that is as alive as the heart of any man and a hunger for cruelty that not even the worst of men can match.

When outsiders visit Verlassen and ask why such a stretch of seemingly lush land is going untapped of its natural resources, the villagers are prone to telling them a tale of a hunter who took his family into the Forest – and was never seen again.

“Only his little girl made it out alive,” the villagers would whisper, crossing themselves as they did, “and she was never right again after that –  _ never _ right.”

When outsiders would press for details about what had happened to the little girl in the Forest, the villagers would feign reluctance...and then comply in grisly description. Most of the outsiders who heard these tales would think the villagers quite mad – or, at least, that the little girl who told them such things was mad herself – and some even believed them, but the result was the same regardless: they all avoided the Forest. Better safe than sorry, after all.

But here is what the villagers don’t tell outsiders about the Forest. Here is what they don’t even tell themselves. Here is what they don’t  _ know _ and what they  _ would _ know if they’d only ask the Forest about it, if only they knew the Forest could speak when provided with a suitable body to speak through, if only they were brave enough to try – 

The Forest is alive and does, indeed, have a heart just as all living things do. Put your hand on the bark of any tree, the Forest might tell you, and you can feel its heart beating. The Forest is godless, as it knows no god other than itself. The Forest is evil, in the way that all hunters are evil to their prey. The Forest is cruel, in the way that hunters who enjoy their sport are cruel.

The Forest, if anyone ever asked its opinion, would not disagree about most of the things the villagers of Verlassen an Nachbarin said about it. 

There is one thing, though – one  _ small _ detail – that the Forest would disagree with. 

The Forest would disagree that the village of Verlassen sat at its southern border and it would disagree just as well that the village of Nachbarin was at its north. 

“Borders?” the Forest might ask with amusement, using your wife or child’s own body – their own  _ voice _ – to say it. “What borders do I have? Do you think my roots stop at your tree lines? Do you think the spores of that which grows within me never blow your way? Do you think the wind never carries my leaves and branches into your village where the soil there eats them up if your children don’t pick them up to play with first, allowing me to sink into the softness of their skin? There is nothing that borders me for I am endless. You are inside of me as surely as I am inside of you. You are born in the Forest and you live in the Forest and you will die in the Forest, eventually. I will eat you all when that day comes, but those who think to penetrate the heart of me before their natural time? Those I will make a feast of. In one way or another, I will taste their suffering.”


End file.
